Heidegger and the Global Age 9781786602305, 9781786602329

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Heidegger and the Global Age

New Heidegger Research Series Editors: Gregory Fried, Professor of Philosophy, Suffolk University, USA Richard Polt, Professor of Philosophy, Xavier University, USA The New Heidegger Research series promotes informed and critical dialogue that breaks new philosophical ground by taking into account the full range of Heidegger’s thought, as well as the enduring questions raised by his work. Titles in the Series: After Heidegger?, edited by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (Forthcoming) After the Greeks, Laurence Paul Hemming (Forthcoming) Correspondence 1949–1975, Martin Heidegger, Ernst Jünger, translated by Timothy Quinn Heidegger and Jewish Thought, edited by Micha Brumlik and Elad Lapidot (Forthcoming) Heidegger and the Environment, Casey Rentmeester Heidegger and the Global Age, edited by Antonio Cerella and Louiza Odysseos Heidegger in Russia and Eastern Europe, edited by Jeff Love Heidegger’s Gods, Susanne Claxton Making Sense of Heidegger, Thomas Sheehan Proto-Phenomenology and the Nature of Language, Lawrence J. Hatab The Question Concerning the Thing: On Kant’s Doctrine of the Transcendental Principles, Martin Heidegger, translated by Benjamin D. Crowe and James D. Reid. (Forthcoming)

Heidegger and the Global Age Edited by Antonio Cerella and Louiza Odysseos

London • New York

Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26–34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd.is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www.rowman.com Selection and editorial matter © 2017 Antonio Cerella and Louiza Odysseos. Copyright in individual chapters is held by the respective chapter authors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 978-1-78660-230-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN: 978-1-78660-230-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-78660-232-9 (electronic) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992. Printed in the United States of America

For the people of L’Aquila, who witnessed the disappearance of their world and who, despite everything, are seeking to reanimate it through their being.

Contents

Acknowledgementsix List of Contributors

xi

Editors’ Note

xv

Introduction: De-Framing the Global Antonio Cerella and Louiza Odysseos PART I: INSIDE THE GLOBAL: ENFRAMINGS

1 23

 1  Devastation25 Michael Marder  2  Transnational Islamist Militancy and Heidegger’s Meditations on Technology Nader El-Bizri  3  Environmental (In)Action in the Age of the World Picture Peter Lucas  4  Heidegger and Žižek: On Political and Non-Political Action at the End of History Michael Lewis

43 63

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PART II: ACROSS THE GLOBAL: INFLUENCES

107

 5  Images of the World: Ontology and History in the Work of Foucault, Schmitt and Heidegger Antonio Cerella

109

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 6  Heidegger on Willpower and the Mood of Modernity Erik Ringmar

137

 7  Who Is the Peasant Woman Who Trudges through the Fields? Provincializing Eurocentric Artistic Space Tina Chanter

161

 8  Heidegger’s Hegel, the Christian Jew: ‘Europe’ as ‘Planetary Criminality and Machination’ Laurence Paul Hemming

187

PART III: OUTSIDE THE GLOBAL: CROSSINGS

213

 9  Thinking the Clearing in the Age of the Earth System: Heidegger and ‘Cities Like Forests’ Henry Dicks

215

10  Dwelling Politically: Reading Heidegger in the Anthropocene Sophia Hatzisavvidou

233

11  A Universal Right to Politics: Thinking Heidegger’s Gelassenheit in the Age of the Global Refugee Crisis Peg Birmingham

253

12  The Quest for Global Ethics after the Decolonial Challenge: Potentialities of Heidegger’s Thought Louiza Odysseos

269

13  World Order and Abendland: Heidegger on Global Renewal Fred R. Dallmayr

297

Index

315

Acknowledgements

At the end of a long intellectual journey, it is only right to look back and acknowledge our debts to those institutions that have made this research possible. Our thanks go to the British International Studies Association (BISA), the School of Global Studies of the University of Sussex and its Center for Advanced International Theory (CAIT) for supporting and funding the workshop on ‘Heidegger and the Global Age’ (29–30 October 2015), which laid the foundations of this volume. We also owe thanks and gratitude to the Series Editors, Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, for their constructive comments on an early version of this book, and to the anonymous reviewers who with their thoughtful criticisms have certainly improved the quality of this project. Special thanks, however, go to our contributors, without whom this volume would have not seen the light of the day. Following the publication of the so-called Schwarze Hefte, Heidegger scholarship has, once again, entered into a ‘crisis’. Behind the accusations and condemnations, judgments and prejudgments, absolutions and excommunications, lurks something more profound than an academic interpretation or a page in the history of ideas. The crisis of ‘Heideggerian thinking’ should be placed within the broader process of obliteration of the human sciences that, slowly but firmly, is propagating across the academic system. The answer to the question of whether or not Martin Heidegger’s thought should be thrown away, along with the violent world that elicited it, is only partially contained in the following pages. However, if a thought is still capable of provoking more thought and a fight for the ‘truth’; if a philosophy is still able to give a different atmosphere to things, to shed a ‘magic light’ on them, it must necessarily be related to ‘life’. This book is dedicated to the people of L’Aquila, who witnessed the devastation of their world caused by the earthquake. In their testimonies, ix

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Acknowledgements

one can still encounter that direct and deep experience of space, which is philosophically articulated by Heidegger: the worries, tears, grief, mourning, sorrow, compassion and altruism of those who, within a few moments, were left without the ‘totality of involvements’ that generates the meaning of being-in-the-world. Yet, paradoxically, this physical destruction – the tragic erasing of space – has not removed the experience of place; the disappearance of the visible world has not swallowed the invisible one as well but, in some cases, has strengthened it, providing this invisible place with a more distinct boundary, an indelible memory from which to replenish itself. It is as if the soul of a world is sedimented in the remains, in the survivors. Thus, in the poignant testimony of one survivor, one can still discern the epochal relevance of the question of being: ‘My house is intact but my sister Claudia is gone. Sometimes after lunch she would give me a ride to work: we would stroll along via Strinella, and park near the Villa Comunale for a coffee at the ‘Chalet’. Sometimes C. would join us and, afterwards, I would go towards Collemaggio, my sister and C. towards the city centre. Via Strinella is semideserted now, the Chalet is one of the few bars still open near the historic centre and one can easily park near the Villa because almost no one works there anymore. C. moved to Pescara. I take my coffee alone, moving within a microcosm that I don’t recognize, thinking about all those losses we Aquilani will hardly ever fill. But I will stay here for you, sister!’

List of Contributors

Peg Birmingham is professor of philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago, United States. She is the author of Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility (2006), co-editor (with Philippe van Haute) of Dissensus Communis: Between Ethics and Politics (1996) and co-editor (with Anna Yeatman) of Aporia of Rights: Citizenship in an Era of Human Rights (2014). She is the editor of Philosophy Today. Antonio Cerella is lecturer in politics, international relations and human rights at Kingston University, London, United Kingdom. He is convenor of CRIPT–British International Studies Association working group on contemporary research on international political theory. He is the co-editor of Mimetic Theory and International Studies (2015); The Sacred and the Political: Explorations of Mimesis, Violence and Religion (2016); Carl Schmitt, Political Theology and Modernity (2016); and Machiavelli and International Relations: Critical Reassessments (2016). His new book, Between Earth and Sky: Genealogies of Political Modernity, will be published by Rowman & Littlefield International in 2018. Tina Chanter is professor of philosophy and gender at Kingston University, London, United Kingdom. She is the author of Whose Antigone? The Tragic Marginalization of Slavery (2011); The Picture of Abjection: Film Fetish and the Nature of Difference (2008); Gender (2006); Time, Death and the Feminine: Levinas with Heidegger (2001); and Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Re-writing of the Philosophers (1995). She is also the editor of Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas (2001) and co-editor of Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva’s Polis (2005), Sarah Kofman’s Corpus (2008), and The Returns of Antigone: Interdisciplinary Essays (2014). In addition, she edits the Gender Theory series at SUNY Press. xi

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Her book tentatively titled Rancière, Politics and Art: Broken Perceptions will appear shortly. Fred R. Dallmayr is Packey J. Dee Professor Emeritus in Philosophy and Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, United States. He holds a doctor of law degree from the University of Munich and a Ph.D. from Duke University. During 1991–1992 he was in India on a Fulbright research grant. He is past president of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy (SACP) and past Co-Chair of the ‘Word Public Forum’ (Vienna). Among his recent publications are The Other Heidegger (1993), Dialogue among Civilizations (2002), In Search of the Good Life (2007), The Promise of Democracy (2010), Being in the World: Dialogue and Cosmopolis (2013), Freedom and Solidarity (2015), and Against Apocalypse (2016). Henry Dicks is an environmental philosopher, currently teaching environmental ethics and political philosophy at Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3, France. His research focuses on the philosophy of biomimicry, which he analyses in its ontological, technological, ethical and epistemological dimensions. Following the completion of a D.Phil. at the University of Oxford on Heidegger and environmental philosophy, he has held two post-docs at the Institute for Philosophical Research of the University of Lyon, the most recent one in a collaborative research project of the University of Lyon’s urban studies research centre, IMU (Intelligences des Mondes Urbains), on the emerging concept of ‘biomimetic cities’. Nader El-Bizri is a professor of philosophy and director of the Civilization Studies Program at the American University of Beirut (AUB), Lebanon. He also serves as the director of the Anis Makdisi Program in Literature at AUB, and as the coordinator of the MA in Islamic studies at the AUB Centre for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies. He previously taught at the University of Cambridge, the University of Nottingham, the University of Lincoln, the London Consortium and Harvard University. He also held senior research affiliations at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. His areas of expertise are in Arabic sciences and philosophy, architectural humanities and phenomenology. He serves on various editorial boards of book series and journals, as well as being the general editor of the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity bilingual series. Besides his academic undertakings, he acted as a consultant to the Science Museum in London, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture in Geneva and the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York/Berlin, and contributed to BBC radio/TV cultural programmes. He received various awards including the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences Prize in 2014 and



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has been elected as a Mellon Global Liberal Arts Fellow at the Claremont consortium of Colleges in southern California. Sophia Hatzisavvidou is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies, University of East Anglia, United Kingdom. She studies the incorporation of scientific discourse into policy and therefore how this discourse changes to become politically persuasive. Sophia holds a Ph.D. in political theory from Swansea University and she has previously worked as a lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she taught rhetoric and political communication. She is interested in how political rhetoric, by way of responding to emerging challenges, creates new environments that humans are invited to inhabit in certain ways, as well as in the rhetorical construction and reproduction of the relation and interaction between human and non-human environments. Laurence Paul Hemming is a research professor jointly in Lancaster University’s Philosophy, Politics and Religion Department, and the Lancaster University Management School, United Kingdom. He was formerly Dean of Research for one of the colleges of the University of London. He has published a number of books and translations, including Heidegger’s Atheism (2002); Postmodernity’s Transcending (2005); and Heidegger and Marx: A Productive Dialogue over the Language of Humanism (2013); and is a translator (with Bogdan Costea) of Ernst Jünger’s 1932 The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017). He is currently writing a book on the relationship between love and power in antiquity and today. Michael Lewis is teaching fellow in Philosophy at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, United Kingdom. Educated at the Universities of Warwick and Essex, he has taught philosophy, film, psychoanalysis and philosophical anthropology at the University of Sussex (2007–2009, 2011), University of Warwick (2010), and the University of the West of England (2011–2015). He is the author of Heidegger and the Place of Ethics (2005), Heidegger beyond Deconstruction: On Nature (2007), Derrida and Lacan: Another Writing (2008) and (with Tanja Staehler), Phenomenology: An Introduction (2010). Peter Lucas is principal lecturer in philosophy at the University of Central Lancashire, United Kingdom. He received his Ph.D. from Lancaster University in 1998. He has published in the areas of environmental ethics, philosophy of mental health and the philosophy of the social sciences. He is the author of Ethics and Self-Knowledge: Respect for Self-Interpreting Agents (2011), and his primary research interests lie in attempting to understand the special moral obligations we have to others insofar as they are self-knowing beings.

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Michael Marder is Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, Spain, and Professor-at-Large at the Humanities Institute of Diego Portales University, Chile. An author of eleven books, he is a specialist in phenomenology, political philosophy and environmental thought. His most recent monographs include The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium (2014); Pyropolitics: When the World Is Ablaze (2015); Dust [Object Lessons] (2016); and Energy Dreams: Of Actuality (2017). Louiza Odysseos is senior lecturer in International Relations and deputy director of the Sussex Rights and Justice Research Centre in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex, United Kingdom. She is a member of the international steering group for the Resistance Studies Network and of the management team of the Centre for Advanced International Theory. She has authored The Subject of Coexistence: Otherness in International Relations (2007), drawing on the thought of Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas, as well as numerous articles on international theory, ethics, rights and resistance. She is currently working on a monograph entitled The Reign of Rights in the Era of Rights Disenchantment in Global Politics and exploring questions of coloniality and race within emerging concerns for a decolonial ethics attuned to struggles of decolonization. She has also co-edited  Gendering the International (2002), The International Political Theory of Carl Schmitt (2007) and The Power of Human Rights/The Human Rights of Power (2017). Erik Ringmar is senior lecturer at the Department of Political Science at Lund University, Sweden. He received a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University in 1993 and taught in the Government Department at the London School of Economics for twelve years. He was also a professor of international relations in China for seven years. He is the author of some fifty academic articles and five books. He is currently working on a book about the public mood that preceded the First World War.

Editors’ Note

To date, 97 of the 102 volumes of Martin Heidegger’s Collected Works, the Gesamtausgabe (GA) edited by Vittorio Klostermann, have been published. This impressive body of work, combined with Heidegger’s idiosyncratic language, and the long gestation period of the project (which began in 1975, when Heidegger was still alive, with the publication of Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie – GA24), have given headaches to interpreters and translators. Moreover, in the English-speaking world, Heidegger’s works have been included in different volumes, translated and re-translated, edited and reedited several times. Consequently, the challenge presented to us by a collective project such as this volume was how to choose and use some basic Heideggerian terms consistently. It may suffice to mention such fundamental notions as das Ereignis, sometimes translated as ‘the event’ and sometimes as ‘appropriation’ or ‘the event of appropriation’; or das Gestell, variously rendered in English as ‘enframing’, ‘positionality’ or ‘the world of exploitation’. Given the variety of choices and translations, we had two options: (a) to use the same original sources and translations to promote terminological consistency; or (b) to allow contributors to decide their preferences, sometimes explaining their choices in a footnote. We preferred to take the second path, thus favouring interpretation at the expense of lexical precision. After all, as Walter Benjamin has argued, ‘translatability is an essential quality of certain works’, and Heidegger’s oeuvre, as any great work of art or philosophy, manifests its ‘specific significance’ precisely in its own peculiar (in)translatability. It is therefore up to the careful reader to search for, nurture and then decide its meaning.

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Introduction De-Framing the Global Antonio Cerella and Louiza Odysseos

Sky, and nothing else: the dark sky, full of big stars; the sky, wherein immersed was I, appeared so earthly. And I felt the Earth in the Universe. Quivering, I felt she was also part of the sky. And I saw myself down here, little and lost, wandering, among the stars, upon a star. – Giovanni Pascoli, Il Bolide (1903)1

On Christmas Eve 1968 the three American astronauts of the Apollo 8 mission, while in orbit around the moon, made a new and overwhelming discovery. As their spacecraft emerged from the dark side of the satellite surface, Frank Borman, James Lovell and Bill Anders ‘saw the Earth coming up on this very stark, beat up lunar horizon, an Earth that was the only color’ they could see.2 By circumnavigating the moon, they became the first humans to see the earth rise. In his autobiography, Borman, the mission commander, recalls the experience as follows: ‘I happened to glance out of the still-clear windows just at the moment the Earth appeared over the lunar horizon. It was the most beautiful, heart-catching sight of my life, one that sent a torrent of nostalgia, of sheer homesickness, surging through me’.3 And in an interview with Life magazine in February 1969, he explained the historical significance of that ‘terrestrial vision’: ‘Raging nationalistic interests, famines, wars, pestilences don’t show from that distance [. . .] We are one hunk of ground, water, air, clouds, flouting around in space. From out there it really is “one world”’.4 Probably unknowingly, Borman had thus formulated one of the first notions of ‘globalization’. And it is no coincidence that the so-called Earthrise or Blue Marble photographs taken by the Apollo 8 had an immense impact on 1

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the way we perceive ourselves, our place on the planet and the environment.5 What is more astonishing, however, is the stark contrast between the testimonies of the astronauts of the Apollo mission, who had experienced the earth from space, and that of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who, at the sight of the same ‘space images’ from earth,6 stated in a famous interview: I don’t know if you were shocked, but [certainly] I was shocked when a short time ago I saw the pictures of the Earth taken from the Moon. We don’t need atomic bombs at all [to uproot us] – the uprooting of man is already here. All our relationships have become merely technical ones. It is no longer upon an Earth that man lives today.7

How come, then, that the same ‘vision’ provoked such contrasting and divergent emotions? Why did Borman and his crew, at the sight of the earthrise, feel closer to our ‘very delicate looking’ planet while Heidegger felt uprooted from its space? Is it because the astronauts had a direct experience of the earth from the perspective of the cosmic darkness, while Heidegger had seen the images mediated from his ‘hut’ in the Black Forest? Why does technology appear to Borman like a ‘magic telescope’ capable of revealing the ‘natural unity’ of the world, while to Heidegger it seems a sort of magnifying lens that eradicates our roots, distorting our essence? In short, what is it in those images that had enchanted the Apollo crew and disenchanted Heidegger? To answer these questions, it is necessary to explore some fundamental concepts of Heidegger’s philosophy as he developed them in his magnum opus, Being and Time, and in some of his later works. What emerges from this analysis is a very potent and radical vision of the dangers, excesses and traps of what today we variously call ‘globalization’, ‘mondialization’, or the ‘global age’. Looking at this phenomenon through Heidegger’s eyes, as we shall see, means to think the globality of our contemporary experience in its most essential, profound and philosophical way. *** Homo est imago mundi (man is the image of the world). In the earthrise photographs, probably Heidegger saw the concretization of an argument he had developed many years earlier in an important lecture delivered in Freiburg on 9 June 1938, and titled ‘The Age of the World Picture’.8 In it, he had explored the momentous change in the relation between ‘man’ and ‘world’ brought about by modernity. Although the modern era is characterized by numerous and interrelated phenomena – mainly described as ‘disenchantment’ (Max Weber), ‘imperialism’ (Vladimir Lenin), ‘secularization’ (Carl Schmitt), ‘mobilization’ (Ernst Jünger) and so on – for Heidegger the fundamental event, through which all other forms of modern experience become possible,



Introduction 3

is a new metaphysical self-interpretation of man: his ‘conquest of the world as picture’.9 According to him, this way of positioning oneself and the world, and of revealing the things contained therein, involves the disappearance of the ‘original unity’ that characterizes our being-in-the-world; the opening of a rift in the ontological relation between the ‘Da’ and its ‘-sein’, which Heidegger had analysed in Being and Time. Thus, new abstractions emerge from this rupture, novel ‘conceptual masks’ through which humanity conceals itself, as it were, losing sight of its essence: the objectification of the world and the subjectivization of man. The interweaving of these two processes – that the world becomes picture and man the subject – which is decisive for the essence of modernity illuminates the founding process of modern history, a process that, at first sight, seems almost nonsensical. The process, namely, whereby the more completely and comprehensively the world, as conquered, stands at man’s disposal, and the more objectively the object appears, all the more subjectively (i.e., peremptorily) does the subiectum rise up, and all the more inexorably, too, do observations and teachings about the world transform themselves into a doctrine of man, into an anthropology.10

There would be, therefore, a dialectical relation of co-belonging between the processes of subjectivization and those of objectification. These modern dynamics, in turn, would originate from the same conception of the world: the belief in the (metaphysical) certainty of representation. Thus, modern experience would have developed through a chiasmatic and self-enforcing relationship between the subjective certainty of the object and the secure objectivity of the subject. In other words, for Heidegger, what is sovereign in modernity is the subject’s gaze that looks at – and is mirrored into – the objectivity of the world; the gaze that, by subjectifying the world, objectifies the subject. But if it is true that only with the advent of modernity man begins to be a ‘subject’ that faces a pre-constituted objectivity of the world, what is so negative about this new form of representation? What lies behind the appearance of this ‘objective’ and ‘empty’ form of man? What does it signify that man must be ‘everywhere and at all times determinable and, that means, representable’?11 If we follow Heidegger, it means that man disappears as ‘potentiality’; that certainty takes the place of the search for ‘truth’; that the infinite forms-of-life elicited by Dasein’s finitude are reduced to one; and that the earth, by losing its symbolic and auto-poietic force, now becomes a flattened space for dominion, extraction and manipulation. In the planetary imperialism of technically organized man the subjectivism of man reaches its highest point from which it will descend to the flatness of organized

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uniformity and there establish itself. This uniformity becomes the surest instrument of the total, i.e., technological, dominion over the earth. The modern freedom of subjectivity is completely absorbed into the corresponding objectivity.12

For Heidegger, the magnified projection of the human ego into the image of the earth triggers the will to power of homo faber inside the modern isotropic space of globalization. Thus the earth, that for centuries was conceived and experienced as the ground that illuminates our dwelling (Gaia, Terra Mater), is replaced with its outward appearance, an imago, a phantasm which captures the worldliness of being, without grasping its more profound essence. Indeed, the fact that the human ego ‘grasps’ the world as a picture implies that she perceives it as her world. The earth thus becomes the objectified object of the sole sovereign subject: human activity. In turn, that the human being projects herself into the objectivity of the world means that she perceives herself, not only as a subject but also as something objective, given, unproblematic. The emergence of the global age from the ashes of modernity, then, involves the disappearance of man as ‘problem’ and self-opening ‘mystery’. The fundamental philosophical question (‘Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing?’) is not only ignored but literally disappears.13 And this concealment, according to Heidegger, represents a closure of the existential potentialities of man, who is now no longer ‘looked upon by beings’ and ‘gathered by self-opening beings into presencing with them’.14 *** The physical exploitation of the earth as global space is therefore the practical result of a specific metaphysical (re)occupation that forms the background of the modern age. When the question of man, of his being and representing, is eclipsed, what appears is thus the age of ‘total mobilization’.15 Quantity, measurement and calculation take the place of God, the cosmos and being. And in this way, modern technology, as super-objectification of the world, becomes the predominant force behind the process of planetary conquest.16 Moreover, according to Heidegger, the age of Technik introduces a paradoxical form of ‘freedom’ in the relation between man and world. In fact, once the subject has made a quasi-complete objectification of beings, the world is transformed into an immense ‘standing-reserve’ in which man is no longer considered an end in himself (as in the Kantian formulation) but, on the contrary, becomes a means without ends.17 His freedom, then, is sucked into a self-regulating system that shapes the new ‘form’ of the world, what Heidegger calls das Gestell. This means that man is not merely abandoned ‘in the midst of beings’,18 he is not simply a part of a process of infinite exploitation of the earth (by now seen only as resource and energy), but he is himself consumed as a piece (das Stück) within this self-reproducing mechanism.



Introduction 5

Man is trapped in the (alleged) unstoppability of the technical apparatus precisely because his infinite potentiality is transferred into the total occupation of terrestrial space and its resources. For Heidegger, therefore, technological objectification is a reduction, and not an enlargement, of human existential and imaginative power. Material occupation, based on the abstraction of calculation, involves the occlusion of the open, infinite horizon of meaningfulness (die Lichtung) and the devastation of the finite one (the earth). From this perspective, then, it is possible to understand why the so-called process of ‘rationalization’, unleashed on a global scale, cannot be rationally limited, and the finite resources of the earth can be constantly exploited with an infinite will to power (this issue is discussed in chapter 3). The only freedom left in the hands of the ‘modern subject’ would be to participate in the infinite processuality of techno-scientific-industrial development. However, for Heidegger, this is but a ‘negative freedom’ captured inside the ‘bad infinity’ growing in the shadow left by the death of God, in the void created by the disappearance of the mythopoeic forces that the modern subject has driven out of the historical course, thus emptying history of any meaning. As Max Weber rhetorically put it, ‘[d]oes “progress” as such have a discernible meaning that goes beyond the merely technical, so that it might be a meaningful occupation to work in the service of progress?’19 Here Heidegger touches upon and radicalizes some Weberian motifs: when human life and its finitude are sucked into the meaningless infinity of the technical process, then even death becomes a meaningless occurrence. ‘And because death is meaningless, cultural life in itself will also be meaningless, since it is the senseless “progressive character” of cultural life that brands death as meaninglessness’20 (on this, see the contribution of Cerella next). Precisely death – which represented the fulcrum of, and the spark that lit up, the special relation Dasein assumes with its own existence and temporality – seems to lose its auto-poietic and self-projecting force. Dasein’s infinite potential, self-generated through the conscious acceptance of our radical finitude, loses its impetus. In the mare magnum of total mobilization, the modern subject seems to drown in a nihilistic drift, without anchors of signification to which to cling. As is well known, Heidegger’s considerations on modern technicity, which we have briefly summed up here, have been the subject to numerous criticisms. It has been said, not without reason, that Heidegger was a reactionary, an enemy of modernity and technology, a typical representative of what Karl Löwith has defined ‘the catastrophic manner of thinking characteristic of the generation of Germans after the First World War’.21 And although some of these criticisms are on the mark, what gets lost in the debate is the depth of

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Heidegger’s analysis of the planetary process of technological occupation. His problematization of the notion of ‘space’ offers us a case in point. In effect, in Being and Time, he had addressed the question of spatiality in a way which is diametrically opposed to that of the theorists of globalization. Here is a crucial passage: Space is not in the subject, nor is the world in space. Space is rather ‘in’ the world in so far as space has been disclosed by that being-in-the-world which is constitutive for Dasein. Space is not to be found in the subject, nor does the subject observe the world ‘as if’ that world were in a space but the ‘subject’ (Dasein), if well understood ontologically, is spatial.22

In other words, Dasein’s spatiality, its being-in-the-world, cannot be understood by analysing the relationship between subject (agent) and object (space).23 According to Heidegger, space is not objective at all but is rather the power of being, the potentiality of opening oneself up to the endless possibilities of the world. In this sense, nearness and distance, proximity and aloofness are neither attributes of and between things nor perceptions of the subject but rather veiling and unveiling of worlds, oscillations between potentialities and actualizations. Dasein understands its ‘here’ [Hier] in terms of its environmental ‘yonder’. The ‘here’ does not mean the ‘where’ of something present-at-hand, but rather the ‘whereat’ [Wobei] of a de-severant Being-alongside, together with this deseverance. Dasein, in accordance with its spatiality, is proximally never here but yonder; from this ‘yonder’ it comes back to its ‘here’; and it comes back to its ‘here’ only in the way in which it interprets its concernful Being-towards in terms of what is ready-to-hand yonder.24

In fact, the fundamental characters of Dasein’s spatiality, de-severance and directionality, are the two faces of the same totality of references and potentialities that constitute what Heidegger calls the ‘world’: we approach and move away from things and places in a constant dance of cross-references within this invisible totality-of-significations (Bedeutungsganze) which gives rhythm to our existence. Space is therefore in the world as an opening of the potentialities of our being.25 And the world, in turn, as ‘manifestness of beings as such as a whole’, is the unlimited open in which Dasein always already finds space for self-projection. As Heidegger emphasizes, ‘The object of the projection is neither the possibility nor the actuality – the projection has no object at all, but is an opening for making-possible. In making-possible the originary relatedness of the possible and the actual, of possibility and actuality in general and as such, is revealed’.26 The world is like a flashing light that illuminates the limits of the actual through the pauses – the dark sides – of the possible.



Introduction 7

It should be clear by now why Heidegger begins his first cycle of lectures in Bremen in the late 50s with the bold statement, ‘All distances in time and space are shrinking’.27 For with these words he had not simply formulated a definition of ‘globalization’ which would have become the most used, although misunderstood, in the social sciences but also a j’accuse to the acritical technophiles and advocates of the ‘globalizing progress’. The technological objectification of the world – the fact that everything, as Heidegger writes, ‘stands equally near and far’28 – literally represents a bewilderment for Dasein, which loses its orientation once its being-in-the-world has been shattered in a myriad of empty ‘here’, ‘there’, ‘subjects’, ‘objects’, ‘beings’ and entia. The new system, the so-called global network, is not a totality of references open to man’s potentiality but rather a closed circuit encoded in the instrumental language of capital and Technik.29 In this sense, then, one may perhaps appreciate why, from a perspective internal to his work, Heidegger’s criticism of globality is not (only) reactionary. In fact, what many of his detractors are missing is an essential part of his thinking: that is ‘that so long as life remains immanent and is interpreted in its own terms’,30 it must be conceived as a meaningful self-opening to the possibilities of historical becoming; that, in other words, man is above all a creator mundi and not merely a manipulator of beings that is passively forced to move around the boundaries of the artificial world designed by Gestell. Whether right or wrong, for Heidegger, ‘the age of the world picture’ – what we now call the ‘global age’ – is a form of ‘existential decay’: from worldforming creatures, we have now become world-formed. Our being-in-theworld has been encapsulated within the new global techno-sphere. *** From what has been discussed so far, it should be apparent that the ‘global age’ represents a ‘crisis’ in and of Heidegger’s thinking; a crisis understood in its literal, etymological sense: a rupture (from the Greek verb krinein, to separate, decide), a turning point, which calls for reflection, evaluation and, therefore, decision. The ‘global’ is, in short, a ‘problem’ – a dispositif, in Foucault’s terminology – which operates both as a concrete historical force (das Gestell) and as an intellectual challenge and that, ultimately, invokes a practico-political choice. And although the deconstructive phase is predominant in Heidegger’s thinking, these three ‘moments’ (challenge-reflection-decision) are always present, sometimes with tragic accents, in the life and work of the ‘magician of Meßkirch’. In effect, it is at this level that we encounter the most blatant problems in the philosophical and existential itinerary of Heidegger, who, in ‘the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism’, thought he had found – or at least was searching for – a political system capable of dealing with the age of planetary technicity.31 Now, the question of whether Heidegger’s

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undiscriminating, personal and ideological choices were motivated by the epochal crisis that had infiltrated into his thinking or were latent and inherent in his thought from the start (which, as matter of fact, could only mirror the crisis from which it emerged) remains one of the most complex, debated and, probably, unresolvable issues (on this, see the contribution of Hemming). In this regard, for example, Karl Löwith has been very critical of his former ‘master’. According to him, ‘[t]he possibility of Heidegger’s political philosophy was born not as a result of a regrettable ‘miscue’, but from the very conception of existence that simultaneously combats and absorbs the “spirit of the age” ’.32 Others, such as Hannah Arendt, have been more benevolent towards Heidegger, and have attributed his ‘mistakes’ to the inexperience of the philosopher who ventured into the territory of the political without the proper practical and conceptual armour; to the naivety of the thinker who paid the price for having ‘once succumbed to the temptation to change his ‘residence’ and to get involved in the world of human affairs’.33 In discussing these and other issues, the unsolved questions and misunderstandings, the risks and contradictions that emerged with the advent of the age of planetary technicity, this volume follows a threefold analytical direction; that is it explores three constitutive dimensions of the problematic relationship between Heidegger and the question of ‘globality’. In the first part, Inside the Global: Enframings, the contributors focus on how the ‘global’, understood both as a concrete problem and intellectual challenge, entered Heidegger’s reflection, and how it is possible to frame the current ‘crisis’ that characterizes our contemporary age through the hermeneutic lens provided by his philosophy. In the second part, Across the Global: Influences, the authors critically analyse the impact and influences that the emergence of the ‘global’ had on the life and work of Heidegger by exploring the ways in which the ‘planetary crisis’ has constituted the (unconscious) background of the German philosopher’s ‘ideological’ and political choices. Finally, the third and last part, Outside the Global: Crossings, offers a critical reading of Heidegger’s work in order to build new conceptual bridges, as it were, between being and nothingness – that is a series of philosophical attempts to cross the nihilistic space that characterizes the so-called age of globalization. The volume opens with a chapter by Michael Marder, which interrogates a central theme of the late Heidegger, ‘devastation’ (Verwüstung). The global age, in fact, presents itself as an era of environmental, cultural and ontological devastation. These analytical plans, however, often overlap in the Heideggerian analysis of Verwüstung, so that it becomes quite difficult to distinguish them. For example, Heidegger sometimes would seem to imply that the ontic destruction (of earth and nature) is the result of an ontological devastation (Seinsvergessenheit, the ‘oblivion, or forgottenness, of being’). But what is the relation between the ontic and the ontological level, action



Introduction 9

and meaning, within this problematic? In other words, what do we do when we devastate the world? What does devastation mean? What has it done and what does it keep doing to ‘us’ and through ‘us’, the devastated devastators? Marder addresses these complex questions through an intense philosophical engagement with Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy and other of his apparently minor writings. Through an original reinterpretation of the socalled ontological difference, Marder shows how the notion of ‘devastation’ indicates, at the same time, the collapse or folding of the ontological plan into the ontic one and the consequent fusion of the latter into the former. As Marder put it, ‘devastation unworlds the world, introducing an immense distance, a vast, non-communicative silence that cuts into Dasein and severs it from its world’. The implosion of the ontological difference thus represents the point-zero where ontological devastation merges into the ontic destruction of the earth, and the will of power, freed from the problem of being, falls prey to the forces of nihilism: ‘destruction destroys that which is framed; devastation strikes at the frame. As the frame vanishes from sight, the framed disappears and is present everywhere. The desert is this unframed unframing, the historical culmination of aspirations toward total translucence’. At this point, a question arises: what can we oppose to this dynamic of devastationdestruction if, precisely with the collapse of the ontological difference, the global age no longer has an ‘outside’, a small opening external to the ‘growing desert’ and that could point the way out? How is it possible to act against a machine (das Gestell) that feeds itself and is fed by actions? In his conclusion, Marder proposes a radical reading of the Heideggerian notion of Gelassenheit, so attempting to play devastation against itself, in order ‘to let devastation de-vastate itself, from within’. In other words, he seems to suggest an act of ‘ontological re-opening’ that is neither active nor passive but reflective – a sort of Benjaminian Jetztzeit that could allow us to ‘suspend’ the global machine and to glimpse, through its mechanics, an escape route. The second contribution follows the path opened by Marder. Nader ElBizri’s chapter consists, in fact, of a philosophical reflection on contemporary transnational Islamist militancy in light of Heidegger’s meditations on the essence of modern technology. More specifically, El-Bizri addresses interrelated themes pertaining to being and nihilism, consideration of martyrdom in being-toward-death, and the uprooted en-framed saying, thinking, and acting that command contemporary modes of reading scripture, or practicing its directives as embodied religion. Usually, and with rare exceptions,34 the emergence of so-called fundamentalisms or religious extremist groups is seen as a form of opposition to the processes of globalization and secularization. Against this simplistic reading, El-Bizri shows how, through Heidegger’s reflections on the essence of technicity in terms of Gestell, it is possible to read these violent and apparently archaic phenomena as a direct

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expression of – and not an opposition to – the dynamics of globalization. In so doing, El-Bizri illustrates how the seemingly atavism of ultra-orthodox Islamism, entangled with advanced technologies, carries out a twofold reversal, through which modernity is transformed into tradition and the latter into modernity. As he put it, ‘The wistful longing for what is religiously premodern is mediated via reconstituted imaginings of en-framed moderns who do not connect with the historical traditions authentically . . . ISIS handles scripture with a selective penchant for violence, while avoiding what inspires mercy and compassion. Established traditions in the exegesis and hermeneutics of sacred texts are occluded, the arts and letters condemned, and technological resourcefulness is celebrated besides fragmentary scriptural enticements to cruelty’. The construction of the ‘extremist imaginarium’, therefore, would be a projection of willpower elicited by das Gestell. ElBizri’s critical reflections help us to shed light on aspects of transnational Islamist militancy that are not customarily examined in political or religious studies. Following the fil rouge that paradoxically binds together action and machination, free will and technical necessity, Freiheit and Gestell, Peter Lucas’s chapter focuses on the deteriorating relationship between ‘man’ and ‘nature’. His starting point is the by now widely accepted evidence which support the claims that we are on the verge of an ‘environmental catastrophe’. It has been recently predicted, for example, that by the end of the century half of all species on earth will face extinction.35 This would represent the worst degradation of biodiversity in millennia. Yet, despite our awareness of the gravity of the situation, effective environmental action is rare, both at governmental and at grass-roots levels. We somehow ‘know’ that environmental problems are ‘real’, but we fail to grasp them as happening here, to us. According to Lucas, this ‘ontological’ malaise, this ‘inaction’, can be understood along Heideggerian lines as a form of world alienation. Alienation is often understood, in Marxian terms, as estrangement from our true human nature, consequent on interpreting ourselves as mere resources. On Heidegger’s view, however, self and world are inextricably linked. Conscious beings are not trapped inside their own heads, unable to bridge the gap to the world outside. Rather, consciousness just is the intentional reaching out to things. For Lucas, therefore, our alienated condition stems as much from interpreting the world around us as a mere resource as it does from interpreting ourselves as mere resources. We may understand the natural systems on which our lives depend in far more detail than our grandparents did; but where those systems are understood as brute agglomerations of objects the resulting knowledge is alienated and alienating. It is our very ‘theory of the real’ that serves to make the earth unreal for us and, Lucas argues, this is the true import of Heidegger’s concern with the world ‘conceived and grasped as picture’.



Introduction 11

But if it is true that our action – or possibility for action – is always already trapped within an image of the world and nature that man has metaphysically pre-constituted, is it still possible to think of a theory of praxis? And in what sense can an action be ‘political’? In the last contribution of this first part, Michael Lewis follows the problematic discussed by Lucas but focuses his analysis on the political significance of action. Through a critical analysis of Žižek’s reading of Heidegger, he touches upon a neuralgic question raised by the conceptual apparatus of the German philosopher: that is what action we might take in order to bring about change in a world which stands at the extreme point of nihilism? Moreover, should this action be political, or might it not rather be ethical, or neither of the two? For Lewis, Žižek’s analysis demonstrates that, with a certain twist, Heidegger’s political engagement can be read as an indication of how one might in fact produce a politics of ‘truth’, a philosophical politics, driven by theory and yet avoiding totalitarianism. As Heidegger’s engagement with National Socialism indicates, he was open to the possibility that a certain political system or political act might prove adequate to the contemporary epoch and even bring about a new one. And this, in Žižek’s terms, would amount to a revolutionary event. Following this path, Lewis contends that the model of action which Žižek wishes to employ can be found not in the middle Heidegger but in the later. He therefore discusses the meaning of ‘political action’ in the later Heidegger by articulating this idea in terms of actuality and potentiality, revolutionary change and emancipation of man. Lewis ends his essay by showing how Žižek’s thesis allows us to reveal another possible reading of Heidegger’s relation to politics and hence a potentially new answer to the still pressing question of ‘what is to be done?’ His interpretation proves to be of crucial importance in light of the so-called end of history thesis and the planetary reach of the system of Gestell. The question of the end of history represents the speculative fulcrum of Cerella’s chapter that opens the second part of the volume. Taking inspiration from Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the crisis of historical consciousness that characterizes modernity, Cerella’s contribution interrogates the meaning of history in the age of globalization. For, what historical experience is still possible at a time when all the most intimate proportions – living, dwelling, acting – are sucked into the empty processuality of technicity? What is the meaning and significance of history within a phenomenon – so-called globalization – whereby discrete and continuous, concrete and abstract, seem to merge into, as Heidegger put it, the ‘uniformity wherein everything is neither far nor near and, as it were, without distance?’36 In order to reconceptualize the notion of history, Cerella’s analysis focuses on the ‘historicity of silence’ – understood both in an ethical and ontological sense – as the ‘matter’ from which historical experience takes shape and significance. According to him, silence – as ‘imaginific matter’

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– is constituted dialectically, that is it constitutes its own constituent. This means that the way in which we imagine and ‘fill’ the silence that surrounds us, as it were, constitutes the metaphysical form of our knowing and acting. Our actions, therefore, are like the shadow of this invisible presence. In order to show how this relationship between ontological silence and history works, Cerella discusses the reflections on silence as developed by Michel Foucault, Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger. These philosophers have conferred an immense import upon the poietic force of silence, to its ability to create imagines mundi (i.e., social ontologies). However, Cerella argues, their very different conceptions of the ontological silence conceal, in turn, some silent ontologies, that is visions of history that operate, sometimes secretly, in their discourses. Although different in terms of political purpose, narrative register and ideological commitment, their ‘silences’ imply a common ‘epistemic sacrifice’: the disappearance of the individual and its concrete historicity. The attempt to combine the ontological level with the historical one, to (con)fuse the speculative plan with the protreptic one has created a void, a ‘silence’, in the conceptual apparatuses of these authors. And this silence, according to him, is also the key to understanding some of Heidegger’s personal and political choices in the 1930s. In the conclusion, therefore, Cerella brings out the hermeneutic path that links these philosophers in order to build an initial argument in favour of an ‘archaeology of silence’. For, he argues, only a profound reconceptualization of silence and its functions can allow us to ‘blow up the continuum of history’, that is to confront the flat and forgetful progressivism that represents the metaphysical background of the global age. Erik Ringmar’s contribution continues exploring the influence of the historical background – the ‘mood’ of modernity – on Heidegger’s work and life. As is well known, references to ‘public moods’ are common in everyday explanations of social events, yet social scientists almost never invoke the notion. Ringmar’s chapter seeks to rethink public moods not as the aggregate of individual opinions or feelings, but as shared affective states in which society as a whole finds itself. Through this original rereading of the analysis of the fundamental attunements, discussed by Heidegger in the lecture course of 1929–1930, he highlights the relevance of epochal socio-economic changes to understand Heidegger’s personal choices and conservative ideas. For conservatives have always been critical of the changes wrought by modern society and, for Ringmar, Heidegger’s discussion of the will to power represents a case in point. True, both the early and late Heidegger advocated a live-andlet-live attitude, which reduced the will to an aspect of care, and the self to a ‘socialized’ being-with-others. For a few years in the 30s, however, he saw the collective will of the people, as expressed by its Führer, as a way in which the ills of modern society could be overcome. The rhetoric of willpower,



Introduction 13

Ringmar concludes, is not a perennial political ‘issue’ nor something inherent in Heidegger’s ‘political thought’ but rather a specific outcome of the sociopolitical changes that took place during the so-called crisis of modernity, and which had an influence on Heidegger as well. Tina Chanter’s chapter explores the same problem – the relationship of mutual influence between modernity and thought – by focusing on one of the most important aspects of Heidegger’s work: his interpretation of the work of art. She approaches Heidegger’s account of the work of art in the context of the readings provided by Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Rancière, drawing on the latter in order to take a critical distance from Heidegger. Chanter acknowledges that Heidegger’s rethinking of temporality and ontology opened up the possibility of thinking the essence of the work of art not in terms of an ontological distinction etched in some timeless dividing line differentiating objects of art from other things. He thought the essence of the artwork rather as an event, a happening, a granting, a clearing, but also as a withdrawing or refusal of truth: truth as concealment and unconcealment, as aletheia. In this sense, the truth of artwork is historical. Yet, Chanter contends, Heidegger’s views are circumscribed by certain residual, cultural attachments to a very modern, Eurocentric account of art. She suggests that while he wants to move away from the conventions of thinking art in relation to genius, to form and matter, and all its attendant distinctions, he remains entrenched in the metaphysical trappings of race, gender and class that confine his attention to taking seriously only certain types of art, only a highly restricted notion of who qualifies as an artist. For Chanter, while Heidegger wanted to get away from the idea of the artist as cause of the artwork, he remained attached to it through his failure to question the modern Eurocentric assumptions that remain invisibly embedded in his account of art. In this sense, to Chanter, modernity – its crisis and ‘impossible’ overcoming – is once again what is at work in Heidegger’s thought. In the concluding contribution of this second part, Laurence Paul Hemming sums up the analysis carried out in the previous chapters on the influence of modernity, and its planetary diffusion, on Heidegger’s thinking. He focuses, however, on the ‘dark side’ of Heidegger’s work, the so-called Black Notebooks (volumes 94–97 of the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe). More specifically, he discusses Heidegger’s astonishing claims about ‘the peculiar predetermination of Jewishness for planetary criminality’ (a phrase, according to Peter Trawny, omitted by Fritz Heidegger from the published edition of vol. 69 of the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe) and which can be found echoed in the Schwarze Hefte. Yet, Hemming contends, foremost among the ‘Christian Jewishness’ that Heidegger identifies must be counted the thought of Hegel, the one whose ‘destructive’ metaphysics, Heidegger tells us, is completed ‘through Marx’, and that stands opposed to ‘the first beginning with

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the Greeks’. For Heidegger, Hegel, even more than Marx, can be said to be the first ‘planetary’ thinker of Western metaphysics, in that he is the first to realize absolute subjectivity as an absolute politics. But in what sense did Hegel and Marx complete the work of planetary devastation? Could Hegel help us to read Heidegger again? How is Heidegger’s ‘anti-Jewishness’ to be understood in light of his deconstruction of metaphysics? Is it plausible that ‘Jewishness’, ‘Hegel’, ‘planetary machination’ are different referents that point to the same crisis that crosses Heidegger’s thinking and that he, in his darkest and lower philosophical moments, indicated by those names? Hemming’s contribution shows that every simplistic reading of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism has to deal with the most complex and obscure side of his philosophy. As for Hemming own’s reading, this is not an absolution – which is indeed impossible – of Heidegger the ‘Nazi’ and his ‘anti-Semitism’, but rather a problematization of the struggle that his Seinsdenken undertook with the ‘desertification of meanings’ that characterizes modernity, in its projection into the new global era. If therefore modernity and its merging into globality represent a challenge for Heidegger’s thinking, the third and final part of the volume – Outside the Global: Crossings – provides a critical discussion of Heidegger’s work through which to imagine a way out of the global. In line with this aim, the contributions of Henry Dicks and Sophia Hatzisavvidou explore two different re-actualizations of the idea of ‘dwelling’. It is well known that this notion is the focal point of Heidegger’s analysis, especially in relation to the problem of planetary technicity. The uprooting of man produced by Technik is indeed the most obvious aspect of the crisis inaugurated by modernity. As we have seen, one the principal problems with the ‘age of the world picture’ is that the world is to be represented and manipulated, not inhabited as that ‘opening’ or ‘space’ where things come to and withdraw from presence. The world, therefore, comes to be understood as a ‘system’, a literal translation of Heidegger’s concept of Gestell, and more specifically as an ‘earth system’ containing physical, biological and human components. This world view in turn enables us to see that anthropogenic perturbations are posing increasing dangers to various different aspects of the earth system: climate regulation, species diversity, human well-being and so on. How is it then possible to rethink our dwelling in an age of environmental crisis, digital socialization and social engineering? Dicks discusses this difficult question through an interpretation of the metaphor of ‘the city as a forest’. He returns to the problematic opened by Lucas on the relationship between man and the environment, by analysing an increasingly influential response to the ‘crisis of dwelling’ which goes under the name of ‘biomimicry’, and which proposes that we henceforth see not God, Man or beings, but rather Nature as our ‘model, measure, and mentor’. This idea has proved to be influential, especially in France and Britain



Introduction 15

and has given rise to the project of building ‘biomimetic cities’, that is new places of dwelling based on the assumption that we should ‘imagine a building like a tree, a city like a forest’. Dicks’s analysis problematizes this novel approach by raising the question of the place that humans would occupy in ‘cities like forests’. His principal argument is that it is in response to this question that the clearing, in Heideggerian terms, may overcome its current state of concealment, for, as he shows via a critical reading of Peter Sloterdijk’s book ‘Die Domestikation des Seins’, it is possible not just to imagine a building like a tree and a city like a forest, but also to imagine the urban agora like a clearing in the forest. A new ‘urban clearing’, finally reopened to our dwelling, is Dick’s answer to the crisis brought about by ‘the age of world picture’. Sophia Hatzisavvidou’s chapter offers an important counterpart to Dicks’s essay. Starting from the same assumptions – that is that human activities have transformed the conditions and functions of the earth systems in unprecedented ways – she proposes a rereading of Heidegger’s idea of dwelling to conceptualize the task of envisioning a more just rearrangement of the ‘order of things’ in the so-called Anthropocene. Towards this direction, she takes on Heidegger’s ontological scrutiny of ‘original ethics’ and proposes that we grasp ēthos as a particular mode of dwelling in the world, whereby one engages world affairs – affairs that concern human beings – with ‘care’. Yet, as she explains, care itself is insufficient to inform our dwelling in the earth given the challenge of natural resource scarcity. Rather, care needs to be coupled with the disposition to pursue justice, which is in the essay affirmed as dikē (understood as ‘human accountability’). We are human, ‘dwellers’, because we care to achieve a more just, that is less hubristic rearrangement of the ‘order of things’. In this way, according to Hatzisavvidou, we can attend to the anthropos in the Anthropocene in a way that produces the possibility of addressing the ecological crisis while resisting both the objectification of the world and its anthropocentrism. Peg Birmingham’s chapter continues this exploration into the territory of ethics. The starting point of her analysis is the so-called migrant crisis, a phenomenon that clearly demonstrates that globalization is nothing global. In fact, the contemporary globalized world is governed by the free market ideology of free mobility of capital and goods, but not the free movement of people and labour. This leads to the paradox that that social-political spaces are economically open to the world, yet closed from the point of view of citizenship and political rights, the latter remaining bound to the sovereign will of the nation state. Birmingham argues that Heidegger’s notion of Gelassenheit allows for a rethinking of the universal right to politics in our critical times. In order to show this, she begins her analysis by exploring how globalization transforms the way in which universality,

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especially in the context of the political, is understood. She then examines how Heidegger’s notion of Gelassenheit allows for rethinking political agency as a set of actions, forces and struggles not tied to an individual or sovereign will. This in turn allows her to rethink a conception of citizenship and political rights no longer tied to the physical and formal boundaries of statehood. In conclusion, Birmingham explains how Gelassenheit must be thought alongside Heidegger’s notion of the ‘Open’ and that together these two terms allow for thinking a new universal right to politics. However, and this is the crucial point, how is it possible to elaborate a notion of the universality of law without eradicating and rendering uniform the historical individualities that inhabit different cultural contexts? How can we overcome the Western-centrism of human rights without repeating the same epistemological mistakes, thus creating a truly universal legal framework for the ‘human’? Birmingham’s suggestion is that a universal right to politics is neither Western-centric nor destructive; rather it is aporetic; it is a right that contains both the claim to universality and to particularity, that is a universal right to belong to a particular political community. At the register of the universal, therefore, the right to politics is rooted in a universal claim of ‘belonging’ to a space of appearance; what she calls – adapting Heidegger’s terminology – a ‘right to appearance’. Louiza Odysseos’s contribution continues the analysis of the question of ethics in the age of globalization but from a reversed perspective: that of the ‘colonized’ periphery of the world. The problematic she deals with is distinct yet contiguous to Birmingham’s: is it actually possible to think of a global ethics that includes, without absorbing and erasing, the pre- and post-colonial voices and experiences? To what extent can we develop a non-Eurocentric and decolonial global ethics? Odysseos’s point of departure is that our articulation of a global decolonial ethics need to simultaneously engage with new ways of thinking and being ethical and political, or what the Jamaican thinker Sylvia Wynter calls in summary form the struggle for the ‘hybridly human’. Failing to question the ‘epistemic privilege’ of the ‘Western subject’, Odysseos contends, serves to naturalize it as the archetypal subject of moral enquiry and to reinforce our silence as to its epistemic privilege and other forms of injustice and entrenches its centrality to ethics in the global era. She then suggests that thinking ‘with’, and often against, Heidegger may aid attempts to articulate a global ethics in ways which acknowledge, and are coherent with, the decolonial challenge to knowledge and history. This may sound surprising to those rightly cautious about the apparent Eurocentrism found on the surface of Heideggerian texts. However, as she explains, the work of Heidegger, approached critically and with the decolonial challenge in mind, offers us resources to continue the interrogation of a formally indicated ‘global ethics’. Heidegger’s thought, which Odysseos explores in its key



Introduction 17

moments, can actively engage in the decolonial challenge, just as the decolonial critique can reveal significant lacunae and silences in the Heideggerian corpus, and which need to be acknowledged. She concludes her chapter by discussing the incessant unworking of modern subjectivity in Heidegger’s earlier work on human existence (in the 1910s–1920s), which questions ‘who’ and ‘what’ we are as ‘human’ and, thus, in certain respects coheres with Wynter’s struggle for the ‘hybridly human’ that advances a decolonial questioning of the now dominant and always racialized existing answers and ways of knowing ‘who we are’. The final chapter of the volume is left to Fred Dallmayr’s pen. He looks at the past from the perspective of the future and seeks to see, with the help of Heidegger, the dawn of a global renewal. He argues that the transition from the present global disorder to an ‘other’ global future requires a basic ‘turning’ (Kehre, Umkehr) in both inter-human and inter-national relations. Thus Dallmayr takes his departure from Heidegger’s comments on global politics written during the time of the Nazi regime and the Second World War. The gist of these comments was a radical critique of totalizing power (power for power’s sake) and technical fabrication (Machenschaft). For Heidegger, the modern West has been deeply embroiled in the glorification of anthropocentric power over the globe. However, in some of his writings after the war, Heidegger adumbrated ‘other’ possibilities for what he now called the ‘Evening Land’ (Abendland), possibilities anchored in ‘letting-be’ and a pervasive openness to ‘Ereignis’ (the ‘event of appropriation’). By way of conclusion, Dallmayr ponders some implications of these ideas for contemporary global renewal by asking: what pathways can lead us beyond and away from the dangers of global annihilation and towards the ‘still concealed Abendland’? What ‘other’, new beginning is therefore possible in the age of Gestell? And is it truly possible to reverse the movement of the angel of history, to give our backs to the past and thus disclosing ourselves to the future? Without resorting to easy answers, the message Dallmayr sends us is filled with poetic hope: we will find again our authentic path and true dwelling only if we are to reopen the question of our being, thus passing through the dark valley that from the globe leads back to the earth. *** Needless to say, the various portraits and critical rereadings of Heidegger’s thinking gathered in this volume are not intended to provide a comprehensive discussion of the complex problem of the ‘global’, but rather to provide some reflections and ideas – ‘pathmarks’, as it were – through which to rethink the challenges that our age presents us. In this sense, they do not seek to find a definitive answer to the vexata quaestio: ‘what ought we to do now?’ This book, born from a critical and open discussion, sine ira et studio, would

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achieve its aim if it could instil a new and different question in the reader’s mind. After all, the primordial act of philosophy – questioning – can only be, as Heidegger put it, ‘the piety of thinking’. For thinking in general – and critical thinking in particular – cannot in itself change the world, but rather prepare us to see it differently with the eyes of the mind. This and nothing else is its purpose. And today insofar as the relation between human beings and world, our environment and the ‘Others’, is increasingly determined by our schizophrenic oscillation between nationalism and globalization, deforestation and reforestation, segregation and integration, colonization and decolonization, decision and indecision perhaps it could be a good idea to bracket the question of ‘what to do’, if only for a moment, and follow Heidegger’s path: rest our ear against the world’s heart and feel the fragile beat of our intimate, shared finitude, thus reimagining anew its infinite possibilities. In the words of a poem Heidegger wrote for Hannah Arendt: Death is Being’s mountainous region in the poetry of the world. Death will save what’s yours and mine from the falling weight – falling toward silence’s height, toward the star of earth.37

NOTES 1 Cielo, e non altro: il cupo cielo, pieno/di grandi stelle: il cielo, in cui sommerso/mi parve quanto mi parea terreno./E la Terra sentii nell’Universo./Sentii, fremendo, ch’è del cielo anch’ella./E mi vidi quaggiù piccolo e sperso/errare, tra le stelle, in una stella. Giovanni Pascoli, Canti di Castelvecchio (Milano: Rizzoli, 1983 [1903]), 147, our translation. 2 James Lovell cited in Robert Poole, Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 2. 3 Ibid. 4 Frank Borman, Life, 17 February 1969, cited in Poole, Earthrise, 2, our emphasis. 5 For a historical account, see the beautiful book of Poole, Earthrise. 6 Heidegger’s interview with the Spiegel editors took place on 23 September 1966. With all probability, therefore, the images of the earth to which Heidegger refers were those taken and transmitted by the unmanned Lunar Orbiter 1 spacecraft on 23 and 25 August 1966. Although the first-ever images of the earth taken from the distance of the moon, and unlike the Apollo 8 earthrise colour photographs, these pictures were in black and white.



Introduction 19

7 Martin Heidegger, ‘‘Only a God Can Save Us’: The Spiegel Interview (1966)’, trans. William J. Richardson, in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan (Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1981), 56. 8 The original title of the lecture was ‘Die Begründung des neuzeitlichen Weltbildes durch die Metaphysik’ (The Founding of the Modern World Picture by Metaphysics). See Martin Heidegger, Holzwege (GA5), ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977), 376. 9 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, in Off the Beaten Tracks, trans. and ed. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 71. 10 Ibid., 70. 11 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question of Being’, in Philosophical and Political Writings, ed. Manfred Stassen (New York and London: Continuum, 2003), 129. 12 Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, 84. 13 In Heidegger’s own formulation, ‘Warum ist überhaupt Seiendes und nicht vielmehr Nichts?’ Cf. Martin Heidegger, ‘Was ist Metaphysik? (1929)’, in Wegmarken (GA9), ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976), 122. 14 Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, 68. 15 Cf. Ernst Jünger, ‘Total Mobilization’, in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Wolin and trans. Joel Golb and Richard Wolin (Cambridge: MIT Press), 117–39. 16 ‘Machine technology still remains the most visible outgrowth of the essence of modern technology, an essence which is identical with the essence of modern metaphysics’. Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, our emphasis. 17 ‘Man regarded as person, that is, as the subject of morally practical reason, is exalted above any price; for as a person (homo noumenon) he is not to be valued merely as a means to the ends of others or even to his own ends, but as an end in himself, that is, he possesses a dignity (an absolute inner worth) by which he exacts respect for himself from all other rational beings in the world’. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 [1797]), 230. 18 ‘Verlassenheit des heutigen Menschen inmitten des Seienden’. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität (Breislau: Korn, 1933), 12. 19 Max Weber, ‘Science as Profession and Vocation’, in Collected Methodological Writings, ed. Hans Henrik Bruun and Sam Whimster and trans. Hans Henrik Bruun (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 342, our emphasis. 20 Ibid. 21 Karl Löwith, ‘The Occasional Decisionism of Carl Schmitt’, in Heidegger and European Nihilism, ed. Richard Wolin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998 [1935]), 166. For a critical discussion of Heidegger’s view of technology, see Thomas Sheehan, Making Sense of Heidegger. A Paradigm Shift (London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 271–94. See also Arthur Bradley, Originary Technicity: The Theory of Technology from Marx to Derrida (New York: Palgrave, 2011), especially 68–93.

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22 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1962), 146, emphasis in original, translation slightly modified. 23 For a good discussion, see Jeff Malpas, Heidegger and the Thinking of Place: Explorations in the Topology of Being (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), especially 115–35. Malpas, however, rethinks ‘spatiality’ through the problem of ‘action’ so that he conceptually distinguishes ‘space’ according to the Kantian understanding of ‘objectivity’ and ‘subjectivity’. In our view, Heidegger does not – and cannot – think spatiality from the standpoint of ‘action’ but only from that of the potentiality of action. See, for example, Martin Heidegger, Besinnung (GA66), ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1997), 117: ‘Das Inzwischen des Da ist vor-räumlich und vor-zeitlich zu nehmen, wenn “Raum” und “Zeit” den gegenständlichen Bereich des Vorhandenen und seiner ort- und zeitpunkthaften Vor-stellung meinen’ (The in-between of the ‘Da’ is to be taken as pre-spatial and pre-temporal, if by ‘space’ and ‘time’ we mean the objective sphere of the presentat-hand and the pointillistic representations of place and time). Our translation, emphasis in original. 24 Heidegger, Being and Time, 142. 25 ‘Der Mensch ist nicht so im Raum wie ein Körper. Der Mensch ist so im Raum, daß er den Raum einräumt. Raum immer schon eingeräumt hat. . . . Der Mensch läßt den Raum als das Räumende, Freigebende zu und richtet sich und die Dinge in diesem Freien ein. Der Mensch hat keinen Körper und ist kein Körper, sondern er lebt seinen Leib. Der Mensch lebt, indem er lebt und so in das Offene des Raumes eingellassen ist und durch dieses Sicheinlassen im vorhinein schon im Verhältnis zu den Mitmenschen und den Dingen sich aufhält’. (Man is not in space as a body. Man is in space because he gives space, and space is always already given to him. . . . Man accepts space as spatializing, liberating, and orients himself and things in this opening. Man has not a body and is not a body but rather lives his body. Man lives by living and is thus already integrated into the open of space, and through this engagement is always already in relation to his fellow human beings and things.) Cf. Martin Heidegger, Bemerkungen zu Kunst – Plastik – Raum (1964), ed. Hermann Heidegger (St. Gallen: Erker Verlag, 1996), 13, our translation. 26 Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), 364, emphasis in original. 27 Martin Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012), 3. It is interesting to note that the definition of globalization as ‘time-space compression’ has been (uncritically) adopted and adapted by mainstream social sciences. This is partly due to the influence of David Harvey’s work, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989), 240 ff. 28 Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, 4. 29 See Martin Heidegger, ‘Traditional Language and Technological Language’, trans. Wanda Torres Gregory, Journal of Philosophical Research 23 (1998 [1962]): 129–45.



Introduction 21

30 Max Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’, in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. Hans H. Gerth and Charles Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 152. 31 ‘For me today it is a decisive question as to how any political system – and which one – can be adapted to an epoch of technicity’. Heidegger, ‘Only a God Can Save Us’, 55. For a critical discussion, see Thomas Sheehan, ‘A Normal Nazi’, reviews of The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, edited by Richard Wolin; and Martin Heidegger: Politik und Geschichte im Leben und Denken, by Ernst Nolte, New York Review of Books 40, 14 January 1993, 30–35; and Gregory Fried, Heidegger’s Polemos: From Being to Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). On Heidegger’s anti-Semitism, see Ingo Farin and Jeff Malpas, eds., Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks 1931–1941 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016). 32 Karl Löwith, My Life in Germany before and after 1933: A Report, trans. Elizabeth King (London: Athlone Press, 1994), 43, our emphasis. 33 Hannah Arendt, ‘Heidegger at Eighty’, New York Review of Books, 21 October 1971, 50–54, reprinted in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, ed. Michael Murray (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 301. 34 See Olivier Roy, Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways, trans. Ros Schwartz (London: Hurst & Company, 2010). 35 See the report of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, ‘Biological Extinction’, accessed 12 March 2017, http://www.pas.va/content/dam/accademia/booklet/ booklet_extinction.pdf. See also Damian Carrington, ‘World on Track to Lose TwoThirds of Wild Animals by 2020, Major Report Warns’, Guardian, 27 October 2016, accessed 12 March 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/oct/27/ world-on-track-to-lose-two-thirds-of-wild-animals-by-2020-major-report-warns. 36 Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, 4. 37 ‘Tod ist das Gebirg des Seyns/im Gedicht der Welt./Tod entrettet Deins und Meins/an’s Gewicht, das fällt – /in die Höhe einer Ruh/rein der Stern der Erde zu’. Cf. Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger, Briefe, 1925–1975 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1994), 80, our translation.

Part I

INSIDE THE GLOBAL: ENFRAMINGS

Chapter 1

Devastation Michael Marder

THE ONTOLOGICAL DEVASTATION – OF ONTOLOGY What do we do when we devastate the world? What does devastation do? What has it done, and what does it keep doing to ‘us’ and through ‘us’, the devastated devastators? And is there still anything untouched outside the scope of its implacable force? It is exceptionally difficult to raise, let alone to address, these questions because their referent is so vast as to be nearly unthinkable. They overlap with the question concerning the meaning of being adjusted to the historical ontology of the twenty-first century when not only are beings devastated but also, crucially, being is devastation. In a dialogue that bears a telling signature date, 8 May 1945, Heidegger registers a similar insight: ‘The being of an age of devastation would . . . consist precisely in the abandonment of being [Das Sein eines Zeitalters der Verwüstung bestünde . . . gerade in der Seinsverlassenheit]’.1 We will undoubtedly return to the ‘abandonment of being’, Seinsverlassenheit, that encompasses the being we abandon and the being that leaves us behind (or ahead). Ignoring these ostensibly negligible semantic nuances would be unforgivable, seeing that an effective response to devastation depends on how its meaning, entwined with the meaning of being, resonates with us. But one thing is clear: the ambiguities of abandonment notwithstanding, contemporary being – though this ‘contemporaneity’ is nothing new; it ‘has not existed just since yesterday’2 and might be as old as Western metaphysics – is the devastation of being, rather than being’s withdrawal.

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In everyday speech, devastation is usually synonymous with destruction, yet, Heidegger insists, it is ‘more than destruction’. Devastation is more uncanny than negation [Verwüstung ist mehr als Zerstörung. Verwüstung ist unheimlicher als Vernichtung]. Destruction only sweeps aside all that has grown up or been built up so far; but devastation blocks all future growth and prevents all building. Devastation is more unearthly than mere destruction. Mere destruction sweeps aside all things including even nothingness, while devastation on the contrary establishes and spreads [bestellet und ausbreitet] everything that blocks and prevents.3

The more of devastation, distinguishing it from destruction and negation, is the surplus of positivity ingrained into its capacity to establish and spread its worldlessness on the face of the earth, to create a reality of its own, however de-realizing. It is this surplus of positivity over destruction and negation that empowers devastation to step into the shoes of being and to become ensconced at the heart of fundamental ontology. Militating against the dwelling, which consists in building and cultivation, devastation signals a growing impossibility of growing and a build-up of homelessness. In contrast to destruction that destroys housing, devastation devastates dwelling, striking not at the actual but at the possible, including the very possibility of actuality. Devastation, Verwüstung, is a growing force, a growth, the spread of a desert, Wüste, where nothing grows – which means that being is desertification, the ever-expanding desert – vast, unoccupied, desolate, vacant, vacated of beings. Being ‘as such and as a whole’ is en route to becoming a wasteland. Let us take a step back. Have we not just now defined the ontological by the ontic, being as such by a geographical phenomenon and so have committed a cardinal sin against Heidegger’s philosophical position? We have, and, in this, we are justified by the fact that, together with the difference between earth and world expunged thanks to the spreading worldlessness, onticoontological difference has already collapsed due to the workings of devastation. ‘ “Devastation” [“Verwüstung”] means for us, after all, that everything – the world, the human, and the earth – will be transformed into a desert [Wüste]’.4 Another way of saying this is that everything will be made so vast that all determinate outlines will be ontically lost and that all differences will be ontologically erased on the wind-swept surfaces of the wasteland, the wasteworld and human waste, which we are incessantly producing and which we have become. Globalization (cultural, economic, political) is but a sideshow to such devastating vastness. From the Late Latin devastatio, ‘devastation’ is perhaps more telling than Verwüstung as far as the implosion of ontico-ontological difference is concerned. A speculative word par excellence in the Hegelian tradition,



Devastation 27

devastation negates the vast all the while affirming and, as we have seen, propagating vastness. It can do both things at once because its uncanny force parasitically binds itself to the site of existence (is there, can there be any other kind of site?), which is Dasein, marking the difference between being and beings. Installed there, in the place of existence, devastation widens the ontico-ontological difference up to the point where its distended outlines morph into indifference, the ensuing vastness exceeding every limit. That devastation can be ‘established’ or ‘installed’, emulating the act of commencement, shows how it occupies the terrain that used to be reserved for fundamental ontology. With the younger interlocutor for his mouthpiece, Heidegger intimates in ‘The Evening Conversation’ included in Feldweg-Gespräche 1944–5 that something escapes the force of devastation in the forest, in ‘the capacious, which prevails in the expanse [das Geräumige, das in der Weite waltot]’.5 The capacious makes room for existence, whereas the vast pertains to space, an uninhabited and uninhabitable abstraction. The former receives beings and yet refrains from violating their singularity; the latter is hermetically closed off in its enormous extension, unless we consider the way the desert, akin to a black hole, ‘draws in’ and ‘integrates’ (einbeziehen) everything even as it spreads outwards.6 What is propitious for existence is not the vastness of the desert that suffocates with its very infinity, but the ‘open, yet veiled expanse [offenen und doch verhüllten Weite]’7 of the forest. Another ontic geographical reality, the forest regulates ontico-ontological difference, this time not hollowing it out but potentiating and investing it with meaning, whereas deforestation, in a spiralling cause and effect of desertification, spells out the ontic loss of habitat and the ontological erosion of dwelling. The open closure or the enclosed opening of the forest invites existence into itself in the mode of delimitation. The limits it sets have nothing to do with the transcendental conditions of possibility for having any experience, and everything to do with the phenomenality of finite beings that give and withhold themselves, as well as their being, in their self-presentation. Embodying the vastness of devastation, the desert eliminates the limits that enable the appearing of what appears. Hence, its absolutely open expanse coincides with absolute closure. There needs to be just the right mix of the open and the veiled for beings to flourish in and to have access to their worlds. Heidegger’s word for this mix, for this precarious proportion, is ‘clearing’, Lichtung. An arena of being and understanding, the clearing is an opening in the forest: a rarified site among the trees surrounded by the density of matter, of wood or the woods, that is of what the Greeks called hylē. The strategy of deforestation, desertification, or devastation, which in the end amount to one and the same thing, is to clear the clearing by removing the opacity around its veiled opening. None of the three

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processes comes to rest until the dense vegetal-material, wooden frame of the clearing – the frame that stands for the being-limit of every limit – has been undone. To paraphrase Heidegger, destruction destroys that which is framed; devastation strikes at the frame. As the frame vanishes from sight, the framed disappears and is present everywhere. The desert is this unframed unframing, the historical culmination of aspirations towards total translucence, shared by the Gnostic fight against the evilness of matter and the (pre-critical, preKantian, to be sure) Enlightenment dream of inaugurating the unbounded reign of reason. Devastation, the younger interlocutor in the dialogue concludes, ‘is driven unconditionally [unbedingt zu betreiben]’.8 It proceeds in the name of the unconditional, demolishing all delimitations that crop up as so many obstacles on its path. Unconditionally, devastation de- or un-conditions what could still demonstrate itself in the clearing, not to mention the existentialphenomenological conditions for demonstrating anything. Besides the frame, or along with it, devastation devastates the in-between where every dwelling is situated, das Inzwischen, before the latter is formalized into a difference. To be precise, devastation adjusts the in-between for the epoch of global errancy, when the earth becomes ‘an errant star’, or else ‘a mad star’, Irrstern, ‘which, straying between planetary devastation and the concealment of the beginning, bears the in-between, which is the abyss [die zwischen der planetarischen Verwüstung und der Verbergung des Anfangs irrend das Inzwischen trägt, das der Abgrund ist]’.9 A ray of hope shines in these lines, even if the light itself emanates from the black sun of melancholia. Although there is no more place for the inbetween on the vast plains devastation exposes and leaves behind – although there is no more place for place, a difference gapes between everything thrust open, exposed, unsheltered by devastation and the concealed beginning, the event of another growth. Instead of the veiled expanse of the forest, we witness an intensifying polarization between the translucent openness of the devastated, desertified planet, on the one hand, and the complete withdrawal, the self-veiling of the beginning, on the other. Things are further complicated once we are reminded that much of Heidegger’s thinking around devastation responds to a line from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: ‘The desert grows: woe to the one who harbors deserts! [Die Wüste wächst: weh Dem, der Wüsten birgt!]’10 The concealment (Verbergung) of the beginning might be nothing but the deserts harboured (birgt) within Dasein in the aftermath of the devastation of ontico-ontological difference. The event of another growth would, in that case, culminate in the deserts growing within and outside us. With this, we cross the second positive threshold of ontological devastation, namely its affinity to the emergence out of itself and overall growth of the Greek physis, rendered in Latin as natura. The first threshold referred to how the vastness of devastation parasitically occupied the site of existence



Devastation 29

and ontico-ontological difference, distending them to the point of making their finitude implode into the limitless. Having let devastation into Dasein, having allowed that which does not let anything into itself inhabit the place of existence, the human is expelled outside itself and turns into ‘the satellite [Trabant] of the devastation’.11 That is the moment of devastation’s Bestellung, its establishment within the in-between of fundamental ontology. But, as we know, devastation also spreads (ausbreitet) in a surplus of positivity over mere destruction and negation. Its spreading out is equally parasitic, considering that it usurps the tendency of physis, which for Heidegger is the ancient Greek word for being. In this sense, as well, being is a growing devastation, which is to say, the expansion of deserts, of placeless space, of desolate vastness. ‘The desert grows’: Heidegger hears Nietzsche’s expression with an ear for literalness. A thing ‘in’ physis, the desert takes upon itself the activity of physis as a whole: to grow, to emerge out of itself. Supplanting the figure of a plant that has served as the traditional synecdoche for self-emergent growth, the desert, clear of vegetal traces, now blossoms into the flower of devastating nihilism. The ‘abandonment of life’ in devastation ‘allows for nothing that emerges [aufgeht] of itself, in its emergence unfolds itself, and in unfolding calls others into a co-emerging [Mitafugehen]’.12 But devastation does not simply proscribe emergence and unfolding; it is not just a negative ‘event [Ereignis] through which any and all possibilities for something essential to arise and to bloom [aufgehe und erblühe] in its dominion are suffocated at the root’.13 The event of devastation arises and blooms from the suffocated root of blooming and arising, which is why the desert can grow and which is why that event itself may be described as ‘far-reaching’, or ‘extending its grasp’, vorausgreifende.14 The bifurcated root it suffocates, growing out of and thanks to that very suffocation, is (1) the fertile earth as the fourfold of the entire elemental domain conducive to life and (2) the finite opening of Dasein, the clearing, the space-time of ontico-ontological difference. All that remains is mounting sand, yet to be thought through philosophically. DEVASTATION AND DISARTICULATION As he muses about the meaning of the desert, the older interlocutor in ‘The Evening Conversation’ points to sand in passing only to dismiss the idea that a ‘waterless sandy plain’ exhausts the meaning sought after. A profound sense of the desert, according to him, is to be found in ‘the immeasurable surface as a plain of lifelessness [unabsehbare Oberfläche als die Ebene des Leblosen]’.15 Once the double root of physis and Dasein’s existential ontology has been replaced with the suffocation of and at the root that is proper to devastation, a monstrous surface – exposed but resistant to

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demonstration – unfurls, spreads out and spreads lifelessness as though it were so many seeds or grains of sand. Devastation and desertification are rooted in uprooting, above all in ‘the complete uprooting of beings from beyng [vollzogenen Entwurzelung des Seienden aus dem Seyn]’.16 The growing surface of the desert is the ontic effect of the ontological event whereby beings are cut off from their root, from what hides below the surface, even if the self-veiling of being, as the appearing of appearance, happens entirely on the superficies of that which appears. Still, we should not jump over (the) sand too quickly. Other than mineral wear-and-tear and the calcified slivers of long-dead marine life forms, sand signifies sheer dispersion, the falling apart of dead matter lacking even the traces of past perishing, the decay crucial to growth. Just as sand cannot be gathered into an articulated whole, so the desert precludes the gathering hypostatized in the mediations – for example those provided by plants – between the earth and the sky. The elements are unhinged and disarticulated from one another and each from itself, and, in this disarticulation, they reflect the fate of beings uprooted from being and scattered in the vastness of non-relational expanses. The space of separation is certainly vital to any relation, but when that space expands beyond measure, the related terms lose touch with one another, two particles of sand on the shore of an infinite sea. With the in-between devastated and ontico-ontological difference imploded, every relation is disarticulated, both in the physical and the discursive registers of disarticulation. ‘And what is not all wounded and torn apart in us [alles wund und zerrissen in uns]’, wonders the older interlocutor in Heidegger’s dialogue, when ‘devastation covers our native soil and its hopelessly perplexed [ratlose] humans?’17 The question presupposes that devastation has propagated the desert not only outside – on our ‘native soil’, Heimaterde, irrespective of its national confines: on the earth, elliptically involving all the other elements, as our native home – but also within us, as Nietzsche had already forewarned. The ‘tearing up within us’, the open wound that devours our entire being and is our being as devastation, is the incapacitation of logos, of articulation, to which the connotations of speech, discourse, or logic are added a posteriori. Hopeless perplexity stems from this disarticulation, the unthinkable expansion of the vast in us surpassing the limits of comprehension and of receptivity towards existence. Not because we, who are ‘all wounded and torn apart’, are too self-enclosed but, on the contrary, because we are too open, too distended, too vacant and vacuous to be capacious and hospitable. In other words, it is not that, in devastation, there is no clearing in the density of matter/the woods/hylē in the midst of which we stand but that the clearing dissipates in the cleared expanses of what only yesterday way densely material, vegetal, wooden, so that being ‘in the midst of’ winds up in the middle of nowhere.



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In Freudian psychoanalysis, melancholia behaves ‘like an open wound drawing to itself cathectic energies’ and emptying the ego.18 With Heidegger, we would say that melancholia is devastating, its ‘open wound’ fatally inflicted on the body of speech. Devastation remains unspeakable above and beyond the ‘decision not to talk any more [nicht mehr zu reden] about this devastation for a long time’,19 since there is no place in logos to accommodate that which would be talked about when the latter is based on undermining the articulations and the articulateness of legein (Freud sees in these articulations the success of cathexis). Devastation carries with it a scorching desert silence that, in lieu of future speech, announces a permanent exile of the devastated from the realm of logos. Analogous to the existentiale of being-towarddeath, it empties the world of the things found there. But devastation does not stop at the lucid discovery of the horizon for meaning un-occluded by meaningful things and voids the world itself, annihilating the its worldhood. ‘[T]his devastation concerns, after all, our own essence and its world [unser eigenes Wesen und seine Welt]’;20 it goes to the heart and enucleates ‘our own essence’ (which is, already for Aristotle, a speaking existence) and ‘its world’ strung together from spoken articulations that sublimate the spatial articulations of things, the so-called totality-of-significations.21 Counteracting phenomenological world-creation by means of de-distancing (Ent-fernung) that brings beings near to Dasein in speech,22 devastation unworlds the world, introducing an immense distance, a vast, non-communicative silence that cuts into Dasein and severs it from its world. In addition to being unspeakable, devastation does not present itself in the form of a phenomenon, which can only emerge with the worldly horizon for its backdrop. ‘Unknowable in itself’, in sich unkennbaren,23 its vastness stays completely hidden to the extent that it surpasses and, in the course of surpassing, levels the determinate (closed) openness of experience. Of devastation, there can be no phenomenology, as it is foreign to phenomena and to logos, to that which shows itself and to the how of that showing. ‘How we encounter devastation [wie wir der Verwüstung begegnen können]’ means ‘how we can in no way encounter it [wie wir ihr keineswegs begegnen dürfen]’.24 Unfeasible as speaking about devastation might be, Heidegger recognizes the necessity of doing so. The older interlocutor confesses: ‘Therefore I also feel that it is again and again necessary for me to bring this devastation to speech [die Sprache darauf zu bringen]’.25 Note that he does not feel the necessity to ‘speak of this devastation’, as the English translator of the text Bret Davis implies, but to bring the unspeakable, expanding vastness to speech. It is to permit logos, or at any rate what is left of it, to graze and to be grazed by the unthinkable and the unspeakable, assuming that this mutual grazing can happen between a finite assemblage and the un-delimited. Now, Heidegger brings devastation to speech by means of the

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category of evil: ‘devastation is eventuated [sich ereignet] as evil’26; ‘the devastation of the earth [Verwüstung der Erde] and the annihilation of the human essence [Vernichtung des Menschenwesens] that goes along with it are somehow evil itself [das Böse selbst]’.27 Why such indeterminacy of expression: ‘somehow’, ‘in some way’, irgendwie? How are devastation and annihilation ‘evil itself’? ‘Somehow’ is a cautious word; better, it is a word of caution addressed to those who strive to categorize, to impose limits, or, in an idealist fervour, to detain the expanding, uncontainable, unconditional vastness in thought alone. Specifically, ‘somehow’ problematizes the immediate association of evil with moral philosophy and relocates it onto the terrain of ontology. Ontological evil, following the thought of Meister Eckhart that dovetails with the Jewish Kabbalistic tradition,28 is absolute separateness or the drive to absolutize separation. The activity proper to evil is not just to disarticulate or to dismember but to render absolute the desolate vastness gaping in disarticulation (including of the in-between), welcoming no beings and undermining being. Ontological evil is, therefore, the other of being – the other which is not nothing. It is what forecloses the non-transcendental conditions of possibility for existence, the existentialphenomenological preconditions for being. Such evil is defined, if definition is what is at stake here, not by the intention behind it but by its activity, with devastation for its content, form and primary effect. ‘The devastation we have in mind . . . is not evil in the sense of moral badness. . . . Rather, evil itself, as malice, is devastating [Vielmehr ist das Böse selbst als das Bösartige verwüstend]’.29 Taken ontologically, evil is the opposite of logos: a disarticulation that creates the vastness of decreation and forbids its own overcoming, be it through healing, rebuilding or replanting. Rebuilding and replanting can mend whatever has been affected by destruction. But they are powerless in the face of devastation that, striking at the possible, at the frame or at the framing, dismembers time itself. Devastation insinuates itself into the future, indefinitely, and it is by no means obvious that the ‘self-veiling of the beginning’ is exempt from the temporal separation, over which devastation and evil preside. When the power of devastation corrals the beginning into non-phenomenality and obscurity, its safekeeping or being ‘completely untouched in pure inceptuality [vollends unberührt in reiner Anfängnis]’30 testifies, contrary to what Heidegger wants to believe, to its secret allegiance with evil. Furthermore, the machinations of metaphysics, according to which certain entities (the Ideas, substance, God . . .) are unaffected by accidents here-below, participate in the non-participable, alogical logic of evil insofar as these entities are kept in a state of absolute separation. That is why the



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devastation of being, as I have already mentioned, might be as old as Western metaphysics: so long as being, whatever its historically specific name or misnomer, is maintained apart from beings, immune to what happens to them, and, in its immutable reality, oblivious to the destitution of the world, that being will be coterminous with devastation. THE ENERGY OF DEVASTATION To recap the argument thus far: A place for dwelling must be capacious enough to contain the dwellers who both articulate and are articulated by it, but its openness must be kept within certain limits. Devastation (Verwüstung) is the increase in the vastness of the capacious, steered towards globality or abstract spatiality, which distends the interval definitive of Dasein and causes it to implode. To devastate is to remove the vastness of the world’s existential spatiality and to replace it with the immensity of the desert (Wüste) or wasteland. It is to purify the clearing in an effort to eliminate the opacity surrounding it and to obviate speech, among other instantiations of logos. Yet, devastation also has a perversely positive side. Undercutting the future of growth and edification (i.e., of dwelling), it grows in a dark parody of physis and beckons with unlimited possibility extracted from the world of finitude. At the zero-point of the absolutely possible (and, therefore, impossible) possibility, existence dissolves in globalized non-places scattered in a planet-wide desert, on the flat grid of abstract space. The positivity of devastation is a trace of its energy, of how it is put to work (en ergon), of its diabolical workings and of the works it produces.31 Heidegger hints at the energetic activity of devastation in his affirmation that ‘it was already at work [am Werk] before the destruction began’.32 ‘At work’, am werk, is the active dimension of energy, as opposed to its substantive dimension, ‘in the work’. So long as the desert grows, devastation is at work, overshadowing the worldhood of the world. The destruction that menaces the world’s contents is logically, if not temporally, posterior to that process. It seems, at first glance, that devastation is no less derivative than destruction: it runs on borrowed energy, the capacity for growth adopted from physis and a measure of vastness educed from the interval of finite existence wedged in the difference between being and beings. Very quickly, however, it becomes obvious that this borrowed energy does not obey the law of entropy inasmuch as it does not undergo gradual depletion similar to the wear-and-tear of things in the world. If anything, and quite remarkably, the power of

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devastation increases in the measure that it presses on towards its only goal, namely the increase of power, the will to willing: The devastation, under an errant star [irrsternliche Verwüstung], has its unified ground in the codetermination of all powers [Zusammenstimmung aller Mächte] in the same will . . . [It] is guided by the principle of the fastest imitating and quantitative surpassing [Überholen]. Nowhere is there transformation, meditation, reconfiguration, but only the single overreaching [Übervorteilung].33

Devastation surpasses and overreaches as a consequence of the work it performs on the limit, the work of decommissioning the limit, putting it out of work. And the fragile limits of the ‘open yet veiled expanse’, of the finite interval within which existence and ontico-ontological difference unfold, suffer the most from its onslaught. Negating the veiled and the finite, time and again, devastation endeavours to do away with the actual and with actuality in general; it procures its energy from the purely possible, from possibility untethered to actuality. In effect, devastation reconfigures energy as pure possibility – something we are intimately familiar with and do not question because that is precisely how energy is typically understood in everyday, political and scientific contexts. Purely possible, energy is potency or power (Macht, potentia) and, at its most essential, the power to have power, which, in a variation on Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’, Heidegger terms ‘the will to willing’, Wille zum Willen. No wonder that our conception and relevant practices of energy are devastating: they are the aftereffects of the lethal work devastation has already done on actuality, with which it aims to dispense altogether. The energy of devastation resorts to the destruction of actuality as its tool of choice in order to arrive at the purely possible, power per se, the philosophers’ transcendental dreamland. When ‘the last restraints to devastation are overcome’, ‘ “destructions” [‘Zerstörungen’] are recognized as mere temporary passageways [Durchgänge]’.34 At the prompting of devastation, destruction, too, turns out to be enabling; its goings-through, leading in every sense nowhere, are a variation on the in-between, void of difference and inhospitable to existence. The passageways in question point not towards another actuality but towards more of the same: deracination, deforestation, desertification, the expanding vastness, burning up the material-vegetal-wooden frame of life for the sake of ‘storing up the ‘potentiality’ of powers [ein ‘Potential’ von Kräften]’.35 It is in accordance with devastation’s total and totalizing paradigm, then, that matter is conceived as temporarily detained energy, or in William Rankine’s expression potential energy to be ‘released’ at any moment from the prison house of actuality. Despite being treated as a passageway, destruction obeys the axiom that ‘devastation devastates the in-between’. In the service of an accumulating



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potentiality, extracted from the limits wherein it was ‘contained’, energy is the in-between lodged between everywhere and nowhere. It is how vastness is actualized in a devastation averse to actuality. Instead of a site of onticoontological difference replete with factical possibilities, the human is also converted into a destructive passageway for devastation striving towards the unconditionally possible. ‘Human individuals and gangs’, the younger interlocutor observes regarding the Second World War in 1945, ‘indeed must instigate and sustain such consequences of the devastation, though never the devastation itself. . . . They are the angry functionaries of their own mediocrity [die wütenden Funktionäre ihrer eigenen Mittelmäßigkeit]’.36 Far from an apology for the crimes of the Nazi regime, which would imply that the supposed instigators of devastation were ‘just’ its conduits, Heidegger’s statement locates the functionaries smack in the passageway of destruction. What has been translated as their ‘mediocracy’, Mittelmäßigkeit, is their ‘middleness’, their being in the middle (Mitte) and serving as the means (Mittel) of devastation, as the passage for the passages destruction has spilled into. The true function of the middling functionaries is not to be the cogs in the devastation machine, but to make sure that it does operate as a gigantic machine for unworlding the world and substituting it with the vastness of desolation. The energy of devastation need not be concentrated in a particular event, be it as stark and traumatic as a global war. Mundane and dispersed, it permeates our lives, organizing them on the basis of the economic paradigm. That is what Heidegger means when he writes that ‘devastation reaches its extreme when it settles into the appearance of a secure state of the world, in order to hold out to the human a satisfactory standard of living as the highest goal of existence [Ziel des Daseins] and to guarantee its realization’.37 A ‘secure state of the world’ overlays sheer worldlessness, and ‘the highest goal of existence’ is held out before a being denied access to the delimited opening of existence. While a devastated world is no longer de-distanced, Dasein itself is subjected to de-distancing (and that is the paradox of devastation, negating and affirming the vast), becoming ready-to-hand, a means in the vast network of energy supplies categorized as ‘human resources’, wasted to the extent that they are productively spent. Again, this development is nothing new; every class society without exception is predicated on the de-distancing of the oppressed. The novel element is not substantial but existential: the acceptance of the economic order as the pinnacle of existence at odds with its existential construal. The ascendency of economism is hardly surprising given that both dwelling and logos have been thoroughly devastated. Dwelling (oikos) and logos jointly constitute ecology, the articulated and articulating finite opening of the world. In their wake, ontology reverts to a desert of being, where beings are exposed and disarticulated. Economy, consequently, presents itself as the only solution, slipping nomos (law or order; the title of the American police

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drama Law and Order really only says nomos twice over) into the vacant spot of logos and, in this compensatory role, mutating into economism. In this scenario, the energy of gathering beings through logos is entrusted to the economic nomos, which prompts humans ‘to think that the ordering of beings and the instituting of order would bring about the substantive fullness of beings [bestandhafte Fülle des Seienden], whereas indeed what is assured everywhere is only the endlessly self-expanding emptiness of devastation [die endlos sich ausdehnende Leere der Verwüstung]’.38 Illusory on the flat and arid grounds of an instituted order, the ‘substantive fullness of beings’ describes a state of actuality, the energy of rest and completion reminiscent of Aristotle’s energeia. That fullness and the energy that goes with it are, nonetheless, unreachable. In the absence of the actual, nomos sustains the purely possible reduced to nothing but ‘the endlessly self-expanding emptiness of devastation’, which, in economic terms, means ‘the business of devastation [das Geschäft der Verwüstung]’, or ‘work for the sake of increased possibilities for work [Arbeitsmöglichkeit]’.39 Devastation is engaged in the business of a massive energy conversion, the conceptual and practical transfer of energy from the actual to the possible, even as the business of working (the ergon of energy) grows more and more devastating insofar as it approaches the ideal of the non-actualizable (not to be conflated with the non-actualizable ideal), calamitous for actuality as a whole. The vastness of devastation thus implies an incomplete and unaccomplishable activity bent on depriving the world of its worldhood. Working without works – there is the model of energy siphoned from ecology to economy, fixated on the merely possible and palatable to those who crave the potency of power. Economism, which partly overlaps with the logic of capitalism it simultaneously precedes and succeeds, is the pinnacle of devastation’s creativity, celebrating a depersonalized subject bereft of substance, perpetually at work and never in the work, isolated from its world. But what exactly is put to work in economism? What does its energy consist in? Certainly, possibility unencumbered with actuality, though, in and of itself, that devastating prospect is not sufficient. The energy of economism is, most importantly and in keeping with the logic or logistics of working without works, the ‘unconditional will to order’, der unbedingte Wille zur Ordnung, which ‘is the goal of planetary devastation [das Ziel der planetarischen Verwüstung]’.40 The unconditional nature of the will to order is telling: it nourishes itself on the unconditionality of devastation, indebted, in turn, to the overcoming of limits, levelling everything delimited, actually existing. Its energetic charge is explosive and it is not contented with anything less than the practical possibility of blowing up the entire planet, as Heidegger mournfully quips.41 The caveat is that, in the capacity of a will and the order it institutes, the unconditional is conditioning, in that it spawns a de-actualized



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actuality where the respective places of beings are determined regardless of their logoi-articulations. Examined closely, economism is but a nomism, an order shorn of dwelling places and devastating the residual possibilities of dwelling (the oikos of oikonomia) on behalf of the absolute, unconditioned, pure possibility whence it draws its energy. A centrepiece of economism, the unconditionally conditioning order is a mirror reflection of devastation that, in the same stroke, negates and affirms vastness, or, in a word, devastates. The unbearable vastness of pure possibility is in sync with an equally intolerable stricture of the possible submitted to the exigencies of ‘planning and calculating’, Planung und Rechnung.42 Just as evil for Heidegger is not a moral but an ontological category, so these operations are not mathematical, or at least not only so. The computation of risks, the assessment of efficaciousness in terms of productivity, the entire apparatus of informatics as a means of control in private, academic and political life are responses to the economistic (i.e., nomistic) directive to shackle the immense possibility divorced from actuality to the domain of what is calculable, what can be processed as so many computer data, what is orderable based on an assigned ranking in an arrangement where the in-between is grasped as an empty slot between two already designated ranks. That which is put to work on the terms and conditions of unconditional calculation is strictly that which is thought (i.e., quantitatively determined) to be consistent with the parameters of the system of calculations and, especially, that which is deemed to hold the potential to augment the substance-free potential of that system. Together with the articulations of logos, the richness of nomos – at the beginning, the divisions of pasturage; later on, the thick fabric of cultural existence, interwoven with the contextual framework of customs and different kinds of law – is sacrificed to a single, abstractly universal instantiation in the law of numbers, of data. The world of data evinces the devastation of the world: of Dasein, of countless lifeworlds, of the earth as the elemental fourfold, of the planet. . . WHAT IS TO BE DONE – ABOUT DOING? As we try to pick up the shards of our devastated actuality, Heidegger urges us to fight ‘the obvious temptation to get over it [mit ihr fertig zu werden]’.43 Kindred to the speculative reversals of devastation, the expression mit etwas fertig zu werden can have two mutually incompatible, significations: to come to terms with something and to overcome something, to get over it. Most likely, Heidegger counsels his readers not to overcome the disaster that is our being in the sense of coming to terms with it, in the sense of accepting it as the default frame for vestiges of existence or

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feeling at home in its generalized and widespread homelessness. The movement of overcoming is, after all, folded into and included in the dynamics of devastation. But the clean cut of an outright negation will also not do. In a condensed form, devastation posits all the problems and hesitancies involved in the project of overcoming nihilism; if nihilism is the overarching heading for the metaphysical epoch we are a part of and if being is devastation, then it cannot be skipped over without, in this leap, provoking further devastation or deepening nihilism. So, what is to be done other than patiently accept or rebelliously reject devastation? In the Black Notebooks, we stumble upon another, this time a relatively positive, formulation: ‘This devastation must then be endured [ausgestanden werden], even if it consumes our powers [Kräfte]’.44 It ought to be lived through, suffered through, borne, albeit without the complicity of having gotten over what is to be endured. But here is a strange thing: although it stands for the potency of power, for a superpower detached from actuality, devastation ‘consumes our powers’, its energy mutating into an anti-power against the horizon of finitude. In this depletion of ‘our powers’, too, there might be a hidden promise mixed with the greatest menace. On the one hand, the devastation to be endured might lead to a final exhaustion drawing into itself, into the black hole that it is, the powers we still have left. On the other hand, the weakening of power as such may portend a recovery of actuality, of the energy of the actual or the actual qua energy, after we have sobered up from our inebriation with potency and pure possibility. When the last shred of our powers has been consumed, will we be able (admittedly, this is no longer a question of ability, capacity, potestas) to regain the meaning of being on the hither side of power and powerlessness? Perfunctory as the above observations might be, they make clear the misguided character of the question, ‘What is to be done about devastation?’ Questions such as this, regarding action, ‘agency’, doing, or ‘empowerment’, ineluctably participate in and contribute to the dynamics of devastation fuelled by the endless activity of working without work, the hyperactive will to willing, the creation of an order heedless to the articulations of beings and the noxious equation of actualitas (originally the Latin translation of the Greek energeia) with actus purus.45 To do something (to do anything, no matter what) about devastation is to help it expand, to see to it that the desert grows vaster yet. At the same time, dwelling on the problem of doing does not condemn us to the kind of resignation that accompanies a lapse into inaction, for which active doing continues to serve as a positive point of reference. A properly Heideggerian desideratum would be to devastate devastation (and that is also the gist of his notion Destruktion or Abbau, dismantling the destructive project of metaphysics), to moderate the absoluteness of the vast so that it could revert back to the roomy and the capacious.



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Have we not just enunciated the issue in the most active terms imaginable? Does ‘to devastate devastation’ not bank on a meta-possibility, exacerbating the tendency already underway? True: in order to resist the temptation to ‘get over’ devastation, our experience of it needs to be deepened. But deepening the otherwise flat and vast growing desert is not acquiescing to its spread. On the contrary, to devastate devastation is to endure it with a difference, to receive the abandonment of beings by being differently, to really receive it in the first place. Readers might recall Heidegger’s complaint that ‘the being of an age of devastation would . . . consist precisely in the abandonment of being [Seinsverlassenheit]’. As I cited that complaint, I suggested that the abandonment ‘encompasses the being we abandon and the being that leaves us behind (or ahead)’, that throws us, utterly exposed, into devastation’s desert. In the state of ontological abandon, we are left on our own, dispossessed even of our ‘own’ being. Seinsverlassenheit grants the gift of freedom, hitherto interpreted as unlimited possibility despite its belonging to a broader problematic of letting (lassen) that had been obscured prior to the advent of devastation. Heidegger adds to his grievance about ‘the abandonment of being’ the idea that devastation ‘no longer allows for [läßt] any beings’.46 Yet underneath the division between letting-be and not letting-be (or letting not be, which is not the same thing), there is just letting without the ontological plus or minus sign. It is to a letting antecedent to the question ‘To be or not to be?’ that devastation guides us. From this vantage point, the abandonment, Verlassenheit, of or by being is convertible into the energetic quietude of releasement, Gelassenheit – letting being in, being let into being, or, more radically still, letting being slip away. In ‘The Evening Conversation’, the forest is the conduit for Gelassenheit in the midst of devastation, a conduit that is emphatically not a passage, a means or an instrument for acting-through; ‘the healing expanse is not that of the forest, but, rather, the forest’s own expanse is let into [eingelassen] what heals’.47 The healing is an expanse that is not so vast as to reduce every place to the desert of spatiality and not so overwhelming as to dwarf every in-between, the site where existence happens. A clearing in the forest fits in but does not entirely fill this expanse. It lets in and is, itself, let into what heals. To those who continue to crave ‘pragmatic’ solutions it might appear that Heidegger’s way of dealing with devastation is to send us back to the forest. Of course, ontically as well as ontologically, the forest (the woods and wood, hylē and its density, the matrix of materia-mater-madera) is the prime target of devastation: at its expense, deserts spread and the vastness of space eats into the capaciousness of places. But insofar as Heidegger emphasizes that the forest’s self-veiling opening is, in its turn, embedded in a roomy ‘healing expanse’, he lets us think something other than a retreat to the wooded areas, euphemistically known as ‘natural reserves’ or ‘national parks’, not yet

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swallowed up by the encroaching desert. Devastation breathes not only with a scorching desert silence but also with opportunities for self-negation and dedesertification, undoing the vastness it spreads. Instead of challenging it from the outside feigned in a series of actions likely to have devastating effects (if only by virtue of asserting their potency, the power to ‘change the situation’ conditioned by the unconditional oversaturation of powers-possibilities), it is advisable to let devastation devastate itself, from within. Which does not come down to waiting, impassively, until nothing remains in the global desert the earth is rapidly turning into, but to letting in (and being let into) the letting suspended between abandonment and releasement, Verlassenheit and Gelassenheit. Perhaps only this in-between within devastation can still save us. Otherwise, our new forty years of wandering in the desert will be extended to four hundred millennia, already without ‘us’. NOTES 1 Martin Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, trans. Bret W. Davis (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010), 138/213. In The Event [trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013)], too, Heidegger interprets devastation as ‘the abandonment of beings by being [Seinsverlassenheit des Seienden]’, 85/101 (hereafter I give the page references of the English and the German editions, separated by an oblique [/]). 2 Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, 133/206. 3 Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? trans. Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (New York and London: Harper & Row, 1968), 11/29–30. 4 Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, 136/211. 5 Ibid., 132/205. 6 Ibid., 136/211. 7 Ibid., 132/205. 8 Ibid., 136/211. 9 Heidegger, The Event, 72/85. 10 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (London and New York: Penguin, 1982), 417, translation modified. 11 Heidegger, The Event, 69/82. 12 Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, 137/212. 13 Ibid., 136/211. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 137/212. 16 Martin Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI: Black Notebooks 1931–1938, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2016), 283/388. 17 Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, 133/206.



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18 ‘The complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound, drawing to itself cathectic energies – which in the transference neuroses we have called “anticathexes” – from all directions, and emptying the ego until it is totally impoverished’. Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume XIV (1914–1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), 253. 19 Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, 133/207. 20 Ibid., 135/210. 21 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1962), 161/204. 22 Ibid., 105/139. 23 Heidegger, The Event, 85/101. 24 Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, 134/208. 25 Ibid., 135/210, translation modified. 26 Ibid., 139/215, translation modified. 27 Ibid., 133/207. 28 Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 237–38. 29 Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, 134/209. 30 Heidegger, The Event, 86/102. 31 For more on my approach to energy, see my Energy Dreams: Of Actuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). 32 Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, 142/220. 33 Heidegger, The Event, 76/91. 34 Ibid., 85/101. 35 Ibid. 36 Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, 136/211, translation modified. 37 Ibid., 138/214. 38 Heidegger, The Event, 141/166. 39 Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, 154/236. 40 Heidegger, The Event, 98/115. 41 Ibid., 85–86/101. 42 Ibid., 85/101. 43 Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, 140/216. 44 Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI, 214/292. 45 Heidegger, The Event, 98/115. 46 Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, 137/213. 47 Ibid., 133/206.

Chapter 2

Transnational Islamist Militancy and Heidegger’s Meditations on Technology Nader El-Bizri

This chapter consists of preliminary reflections on contemporary transnational Islamist militancy in light of Martin Heidegger’s meditations on the essence of modern technology. This inquiry addresses interrelated themes pertaining to thinking about being and nihilism, the gathering of divinities with mortals on earth and under the sky in dwelling (Wohnen),1 the consideration of martyrdom in being-toward-death,2 and the uprooted en-framed saying, thinking and acting that command contemporary modes of reading scripture, discoursing about it, or practicing its directives as embodied religion. This exercise sheds light on aspects of transnational Islamist militancy that are not customarily examined in political or religious studies. We also overstretch the limits of Heidegger’s reflections on the essence of modern technicity (Technik) in terms of Gestell (enframing)3 as the unfurling of historical being, which overwhelms the revealing of truth by positing beings as orderable standing-reserve (Bestand) of resourceful locked energies that get unleashed via technical command. TRANSNATIONAL ISLAMISM The prevalent methods in investigating transnational Islamist militancy are mediated via geopolitics, political economy, international affairs, religious studies, sociology and psychology. To examine this phenomenon in concretized terms, and given that transnational Islamist militancy comes in variegated forms from diverse Muslim confessional and political backgrounds, or levels of violence, we shall focus on the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria/Levant (ISIS or ISIL, or in Arabic coined as ‘da‘ish’). Our analysis 43

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will be undertaken from the standpoint of grasping this violent faction as a phenomenon of reconstituted religiosity that is en-framed by Gestell. Our approach is uncommon since Islamist militancy is conventionally studied by probing the particulars of conflicts such as in Iraq and Syria, and by assessing the ramifications of local despotisms and the abominable SunniShi'i sectarianism. Such wretched strife is perceived as a colonial inheritance of prolonged post-colonial inborn oppressions and foreign imperialist bellicosity. These circumstances are not dissociated from the crisis of liberal, nationalist, socialist, or junta policies in acting as viable alternatives to politicized Islamism, especially in societies that suffer protracted conflicts and have Muslim demographic majorities. These conditions were exacerbated by Arab-Israeli wars, unfulfilled Palestinian quests for justice and undercurrents of Islamist frustrations from the abolition of the Caliphate and aspirations to restore it. Besides the analytics of Middle Eastern security studies and geopolitics, a psychological-social scrutiny also helps in explaining radicalization. Manifold factors come to mind such as antisocial behaviour, peer pressure and/ or support, resentments due to misguided ideology or avenging actual losses, false promises of emancipation, drifting into gangster pursuits of adventure, drugs and sex. Such multifactorial dimensions seem to converge in the case of ISIS that exercises unparalleled savagery. This cruel fanatic organization splintered in 2014 from the deadly al-Qaeda in Iraq and the latter’s lethal Nusra Front in Syria, while self-proclaiming itself as a so-called Caliphate over territories it occupied in the Fertile Crescent across the Sykes-Picot colonial Iraqi-Syrian border. It is also active in Libya, Yemen, Sinai in Egypt, Nigeria, Somalia, Algeria, Mali, Afghanistan, with a global franchised operational reach. ISIS follows extremist-violent-applications of Wahhabist heresiology, as a hybrid austere form of Sunni Salafi fundamentalism and Hanbali ultra-orthopraxy. Wahhabism emerged in the eighteenth-century Najd region of Arabia through the teachings of Muhammad bin ‘Abd al-Wahhab. This clergyman entered into a pact with the regional tribal chief Muhammad bin Saud whose descendants founded the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932 and adopted Wahhabism as its religious law. The petrodollar financed the spread of Wahhabi teachings, with resources that also contribute to the fuelling of hegemonic techno-capitalism on a planetary scale. Militant factions that were inspired by extremist tendencies within Wahhabism and tangentially influenced as early jihadists by the doctrines of Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966) became further emboldened during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and its aftermath, the hostilities in Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Somalia, Algeria, the U.S. occupation of Iraq and current wars in Syria, Libya and Yemen. ISIS embodies violent unconscionable praxis of Wahhabism while nonetheless attacking Saudi Arabia and clashing with al-Qaeda. It has also been operationally influenced



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by former alienated Iraqi Baathists and by die-hard jihadists from Chechnya, Algeria, Bosnia, Somalia and Afghanistan, in addition to European fanatics. Consorted reforms via de-radicalization and rehabilitation are required from the Wahhabi and Sunni traditions by widely denouncing the perversions of ISIS. If such endeavours exist, they come in trickles against the torrent of violent propaganda. Defusing the wars in Syria, Libya and Yemen, and deintensifying the Sunni/Shi'i strife (also as a Saudi/Iranian conflict by proxy), would further constrain ISIS. The erosion of this faction in its battles with organized armies and paramilitaries in Iraq, Syria and Libya compromises its core but does not do away with its morphing into insurgencies that disseminate terror, with the future threat too from radicalized adolescents and children raised by ISIS since 2014.4 MILITANCY Having established the wider parameters surrounding the treatment of our topic, the directives of our investigation are set around technicity and not specifically in terms of probing the paradoxes of ISIS. This organization entangles its ancestral atavism and salvific ultra-orthodox praxis with a ferocity that is unleashed indiscriminately and disseminated via technically sophisticated cybernetics, telecommunication and weaponry. Such calamity is receiving extensive scrutiny in academia, security-dossiers, press and media, and yet it is still most baffling as to why it has been destined our way, while bearing in mind Gestell, or how its enigmatic origins presence from profound traumas. ISIS deploys signifiers that are resurrected from the earliest history of Islam in enflaming the Sunni/Shi'i sectarianism and evoking reconstructions of mediaeval strife with the Crusaders to harbour animosity towards Christians. Whomsoever does not abide by the laws of ISIS and declare allegiance to its self-proclaimed Caliphate is charged with apostasy and legitimized by the group as a target for savage punishments. Militancy reveals the hold of Gestell in how combatants are posited as standing-reserve (Bestand) in conscription, and in association with armament industries and defence budgets. However, such standing-reserve is not restricted to organized armies but is also practised in paramilitary formations that obey what commands the execution of violence. Armed forces posit their combatants as standing-reserves of forceful powers that are lethally unleashed via command chains. This translates in wartime into the apologetics of obeying orders or measuring civilian casualties as collateral damage. Besides the conscription of combatants, mobilization is not confined to the exigencies of the battlefield. Islamist militancy recruits in prisons, or through dissimulated infiltrations in prayer halls (musallah), or by cybernetic means, whether openly or in clandestine brainwashing via pseudonyms, avatars or interactive violent videogames. The atavistic

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reconstruction of what is attributed to ancestors is mediated with hybridity via ultramodern technologies that give a seeming aura to episodic spectacles of cruelty and operate globally with technological sophistication, while at times passing undetected by networks of intelligence due to low-tech stealth manoeuvres. RADICALIZATION A radicalized individual acquires extremist aspirations and an overt readiness to reject the status quo violently. Projected grievances in radicalization blend the personal with the communal through networks of reciprocated support, group cohesion, joint commitment, mutual loyalty and severity in punishing defection. There are lone agents who become radicalized due to narrowed social interactions and closed mindsets in grasping the nature of proximal identity, with predispositions to being aggressive, revengeful and risk-taking. Such operatives become associated with the faction by acting violently in its name without necessarily being recruited via a chain of command or cell. Radicalization desensitizes to criminal violence while generating a new constructed identity and usually away from family. This is coupled with visits to locales that are not regularly frequented in quotidian life, whether the prison, the makeshift prayer-hall, the online downloaded propaganda, or travels to warzones and joining training camps. In protracted conflicts the enemy is dehumanized as subhuman infidel via extremist doctrines that weaken the innate or acquired inhibition against cruelty. The violence is ideological in its eschatological and apocalyptic mythmaking, and it is tribal in its revengeful ferocity and in the way it punishes with brutal chastisement via formulaic diktats. Its dogmatic indoctrination cannot be solely attributed to societal grievances or political ends. Moreover, poverty is not its root cause since many radicalized operatives come from the middle-class with university training, especially in technical applied sciences and engineering. Destitution may be an incentive for some to join such organizations for the aid they provide, but this does not mean it is the radicalizing source. Such horrors cannot also be pathologies of mental illness that remove the agency of criminality. Religious radicalization is a conversion in mindsets and comportments, which manipulates scriptural justifications and entangles them with perverted explications of historical-political-societal injustices. This process actualizes malicious predispositions to vengeance and visceral viciousness in aggressive individuals who are susceptible to indoctrination. WASTELANDS A religiously radicalized – reconstituted – identity by conversion gets entrapped in an extremist polarizing praxis. The radicalized become isolated



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from the wider community, whether in private dissimulations of intent or by being outspoken about disillusionments and the readiness to act violently. They become alienated from society via the development of asymmetrical claims of supremacy and legitimacy. Such psychological-physical distancing from family, friends and neighbours was practised by the 1980s Egyptian cult of al-Takfir wa’l-hijra (literally ‘charging others with apostasy and going on exodus’). The exponents of this group, who later inspired the Arab-Afghan mujahidin at the roots of al-Qaeda, were ready to charge their own families with apostasy,5 sever bonds with them and journey in exodus to deserted remote locales in emulation of what they reconstituted via their fundamentalist imaginaire of the seventh-century hijra of Prophet Muhammad and his companions from Mecca (Quraysh) to Medina (Yathrib). Likewise, ISIS longs for the model it simulates about its imagined seventh-century Muslim desert lifestyle in Arabia, albeit using sophisticated technologies. The inhabited terrains that ISIS conquers become wastelands due to its practised dystopia, and how this also enflames wars that muster the ruthlessness of adversaries in feeding on a vicious cycle of colossal violence, which innocent civilians bearing the brunt. While the followers of ISIS ravage whole communities,6 they also abhor heritage architecture, art, literature, and wither the cultivated landscapes to the point of desertification. Besides blasting pre-Islamic vestiges like Nimrud City in Iraq,7 or the temples of Palmyra in Syria, ISIS desecrates monasteries and churches, detonates Muslim mausoleums and shrines, strikes mosques and hospitals with suicide bombers, and cuts ancient trees that are ecumenically perceived by indigenous locals as being blessing-bearers. An iconoclastic brutishness re-emerged in modern times before ISIS via the Taliban’s demolition of the old Buddha statues in Bamian, despite the appeals of established Sunni institutions to refrain from this religiously unjustified act. By destroying such monuments that stood intact since the early times of Islam in Afghanistan, the perpetrators were charging their Muslim ancestors with idolatry. Violence against architectural heritage embodies a ruinous damnatio memoriae (damnation of memory) that condemns co-religionists as accursed libertines and legislators of sin. Zealots hurl themselves violently on their erstwhile communities, which they construe as a cleansing act from what is perceived by them as abjured symbolic orders, discursive and embodied traditions. This is akin to the practices of the dissident excommunicated Khawarij at the beginnings of Islam, who charged all Muslim co-religionists with apostasy and declared jihad against them. They even turned violence into aesthetics of desolation as sources of poetic delight.8 The Murji’a (deferrers) challenged them by believing that only God distinguishes Muslims from non-Muslims, and that divine judgment on this matter is postponed to the end of times, whereby a grave sinner is not ousted from the faith as infidel, since belief is an inward conviction.9

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The antique tradition in Arabic poetry of standing in lamentation while gazing melancholically at traces left in ruin (atlal) of deserted settlements once inhabited by loved ones, which in pre-Islamic Arabia constituted refined belles lettres, have been perverted into a jouissance with devastation by the Khawarij and those who emulate them. Such vehemence does not let earth self-show itself as what grants a trusted ground for dwelling or as what channels communion with ancestral mortals by recollecting their trace. The atavism of religious belief that has been distorted with wickedness yields cultural and spiritual desertification via longings for imagined seventh-century Arabian lifestyles that negate the richness of traditional nomadic desert cultures. The desert has a purging character in revealing worldly spatial-temporal flux via shifting landscapes of sand-dune silhouettes and skylines. Its inclement daytime scorching sunlight cultivates patience and endurance, while its cooling nocturnal heavenly vault discloses in its night-lights signs of divinity that nurtured the nomad’s spirit and displayed a semblance of eternal fixity in the firmament with harmonics in the motion of celestial bodies. The desertlife diverged not only from that of the polis but also from clearing openings in forest pathless wanderings, or steadfastness in mountain-life that cultivates carved slopes and overlooks horizons, or the contained island-life that invites seafaring on its shores, or life-granting rivers, etc. Such topographies call for thinking about the place of being and offered sites of revelation for Abrahamic monotheism (desert-mounts of Hara’, Sinai, Moriah, Calvariæ hill, Patmos island, Jordan river, cedar-forest hermitages of the Lebanon, Athos mountain-peninsula). ISIS censors the historical narratives in the sequence of Islamic cultures that allow for a measured picturing of the Prophetic tradition, or regards some of them with suspicion as aberrations or heresies. Most of the caliphs and imams of Islam are seen as deviant and reproachable if not chargeable with apostasy. History becomes a dustbin, and the residues of material culture, architectural or textual, are seen as signs of ruined lives to be eradicated. This reflects a form of religious homoeostasis wherein the historical-epochal variables are regulated to give the semblance of constancy in the truisms of religiosity. The experiencing of history is threatened to no longer have a home, yet historical being takes revenge upon those who are estranged from it in uprooted dispersal. The iconoclast despoils things that gather the fourfold (das Geviert) of earth, sky, divinities, mortals (Erde und Himmel, die Göttlichen und die Sterblichen) into a coalesced essential oneness in dwelling. The undoing of such things in our epoch is also happening in stealth and with indirectness in intent via what governs being in the unfurling of modern techno-science. Science compels via its episteme to posit things as objects of mathematical-empirical



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quantitative research on transferred physical energies in transmuting matter, while the Gestell of technicity further abstracts them as objectless standingreserve (Bestand). ‘The deserts grow: woe to him who doth them hide!’ (Die Wüste wächst: weh dem, der Wüsten birgt!).10 OCCLUDED TRADITION The atavism of ultra-orthodox Islamism is entangled with advanced technologies. Attires inspired from pre-modern folkloric costumes are re-branded as ‘Islamic outfits’ and supplemented with modern accessories. Post-modern anachronism and prolepsis retrieves pre-modern symbolic orders as religious identity signifiers that are not restricted to apparel but include embodied gestures, parlance, nicknames, tropes that purportedly emulate what is professed about puritanical Muslim ancestry while rejecting liberal lifestyles and gender relations. ISIS goes further by loathing the mingling of Muslims with nonMuslims in what it describes as the ‘grey zone’ of communal diversity and exploits consequently what dislocates societal cohesion in mixed societies.11 The wistful longing for what is religiously pre-modern is mediated via reconstituted imaginings of en-framed moderns who do not connect with the historical traditions authentically. This might be attributed to a fad in some cases, but in essence it is an incongruous flurry to hold unto what is evacuated from our world as tradition, while toiling to reverse its course by being simply drawn into the draft of its fateful withdrawal. Such dragging is entwined with an outbreak of endeavours to resist what thrusts the retreat, albeit with maladaptive perdition risks, given the power of what is destined our way. In such liminal transition, emptiness is left behind what is evacuated from our world and awaiting what fills it. This in-between gap is senseless by echoing what has been without fathoming it authentically, and facing with ineffableness what is yet to come. Traditional non-technological modes of thinking that are handed down over from pre-modern epochs cannot directly challenge what is en-framed in culture. They are consequently destined to what frames them in antiquarian terms as archives, or pictures them as reactionary atavism or nostalgia. Albeit, history is revengeful in uncanny ways as it erupts in our present or meet us in the future with dogmatic or oblique remembrance, be it with escapist melancholy or inscrutable violence. For ‘the oldest of the old follows behind us in our thinking and yet it comes to meet us’ (Das Älteste der Alten kommt in unserem Denken hinter uns her und doch auf uns zu).12 ISIS handles scripture with a selective penchant for violence,13 while avoiding what inspires mercy and compassion.14 Established traditions in the

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exegesis and hermeneutics of sacred texts are occluded, the arts and letters condemned and technological resourcefulness is celebrated besides fragmentary scriptural enticements to cruelty. The voice is seemingly arrogated by way of memorizing scripture and uttering it selectively in promoting brutality. The self is silenced by letting an arrogated voice that is not its own speak through it, and this destines it on the pathway of disappearance by obeying what commands it to sacrifice itself and others in the name of what is not its own. Silencing is not speechless since haunting words bewitch the utterer and exact consent to the seemingly otherworldly pronouncements. An individual adopts a parlance that repeats memorized scriptural fragments, while associating them with embodied rituals that mimic what is posited as idealized representations. The power of the sayings is derived from a repetitive paraphrasing or reciting of scripture, which silences the utterers while giving them the semblance of elevating their voice through what is not their own as what is believed to be transcendent and otherworldly. What has the seeming power of emboldening the subject is ultimately accentuated through the submissiveness of the self to an otherness that holds sway over it by negating its selfhood. Subjectivity is surpassed via a power that takes hold over it by assimilating it to an alterity that commands through the utterance. MARTYRDOM Bodily mortality is supposedly surpassed via an onto-theological picturing of temporal worldliness as not being the ultimate reality. What is religiously posited as martyrdom secures a passage to an otherworldly afterlife of eternity by hastening death via volitional directional acts, which are pictured as being transcendent in fulfilling the covenant during times of ominous trial. Being-towards-death becomes actualized resolutely rather than awaited as indeterminate fate. The act is driven by religious conviction and in some cases aided by numbing fear via euphoria-inducing narcotics, which are handled through operations that emulate the organized-crime of drug-cartels.15 If all beings are en-framed, then only the nihil radically escapes Gestell without the mediation of a saving power that arises from the site of such danger. What annihilates appears as what saves, whereby death is posited as the shrine of the nothing. The salvific character is sought in non-being by misappropriating what is named since antiquity as ‘martyrdom’. In religious terms, martyrdom bears testimony before holiness through a crowning virtue of magnanimity. When living is unbearable and nihilism is at the root of thinking, what is akin to martyrdom can appear as glorious without being always religious.



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To reflect on the phenomenon of martyrdom in religious terms, its qualification is tied with conceptions of divinity. This brings to mind how the meaning of mercy and compassion is lifted from the uttered Divine names of ‘the most Merciful, the most Compassionate’ (Rahman Rahim) when committing a premeditated act of butchery.16 The sense of what could have been experienced as holy (das Heilige) is rendered vacuous, and the possibility of testament before it is negated. This unfurls against the background of occluding the controversial paradox of the divine essence and attributes within Islamic history.17 A distortion in the understanding of the relation of the human to the divine meant that the experiencing of heaven is sacrificed along with that of earthiness in the name of ‘enjoining goodness and forbidding wrongdoing’,18 which would have been otherwise expected to be upheld piously with compassion, mercy and wisdom. THE VIRTUAL It is timely for ‘divinities to emerge from things by which we dwell?’19 Poetized thinking is constrained from becoming readied to await the arrival of the Holy, without eschatology or prophecy, but simply as a thoughtful questioning of the epochal moment of what en-frames us. What is fabricated is not truth-telling but constitutes simulacra about a bygone age that can no longer be reached if the historical sources that link us to it are condemned as heresies, or traces of material culture that offer a glimpse of its history in archaeological or codicological terms are effaced. In fabricating history, the emphasis on violence retrieves pre-modern practices of arcane warfare, of enslavement and brutality that appear indecipherable in our age. They are staged since they do not belong to our epoch but to what is fictitious about a lost archetypal age, wherein the channels connecting us with it are severed. The imaginaire of scenography, dramatology, cinematography, narrative generation, all make up a story about what has been, and enact it in a staged way with avenging yearnings. A locus is invented to allow for the enactment of spectacles of brutality while being aided by the techniques of modern propaganda, warfare, organized intelligence, gangster tactics, etc. What otherwise could have been a passion play is projected as an actualized nightmare of immeasurable horror. A fabricated fundamentalist imaginaire is shaped by the mystery of the planetary un-thought technicity. Thinking has to address this moment of the world and not block the way to reflecting upon its essence by thoughtfully contemplating what its un-canniness entails. Fabrication belongs to the machination (Machenschaft) that manipulates all beings technically within the metaphysics of production and its will to power.

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The history of Islam after its Prophet’s death is rewritten via scriptural searches for what commands indiscriminate violence, ahistorically and transhistorically, without reference to epochal, geographic, or personal situational contexts, while avoiding measured exegesis and hermeneutics by accentuating literalist truncated readings that fit fabrications of origins and destinies. Scriptures are metamorphosed into technical manuals of troubleshooting searches that seek commands of violence, brutality, and revenge, instead of compassion, mercy, and forgiveness. THE MEASURE If ISIS yearns for reconstructed models of austere desert-lifestyles in seventhcentury Hijaz, it is nonetheless not only equipped with modern technologies, but also deploys contemporary organization, recruitment, grooming, and espionage techniques. Its modes of saying, thinking, desiring, and doing are directed by expedient technicity. The arts, humanities, letters are absent from its obscurantism, in spite of exploiting the eloquence of the classical Arabic language in staged orations that possess the utterers and mesmerize impressionable co-religionist listeners. Humans are posited as standing-reserve to immanentize the eskhaton via planetary expansionism in exercising dominion over an earth that is sacrificed in consciousness via topological desertification and distorted outlooks on heaven. The hold of Gestell is overwhelming in modern societies that are ordered, wherein everything is functioning and continues to be propelled by fulfilling its instrumental destiny. Disorderliness presences in locales that fail to meet this expedient technicity. The command of efficient obedience expands to cover over what is disorderly in view of bringing it in an orderable manner within the fold of what en-frames via technicity. The resistance to Gestell is intrinsic to what rejects being en-framed through stagnation, albeit what stagnates gets encircled and exposed, and its dysfunctional disorderliness is intensified to the moment of necessitating orderliness. Gestell is also disclosed via the dominion of technologically super-organized societal systems on territories that are less equipped technically. This touches upon what measures economy, politics, culture, technical know-how, in terms of responding more efficiently to what commands in the essence of modern technology. The fringes of disorderliness are brought to order either by strife over energy and finances, or through neo-colonialism, imperialism, localized dictatorships by proxy, and global consumerism. Gestell continues to unfold insofar that everything operates, and wherein there are still beings that have not yet been en-framed or consumed as resources. We are gathered not as mortals on earth, under the sky, and in oneness with divinities, but as consumable, disposable,



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perishable, or potentially recyclable resources. Gestell brings about unity in the manifold through irreversible homogenizations that alter the face of earth. What resists from within traditionalism is cracked open, deconstructed and assimilated. Destruction clears therein the pathways to re-energized rebuilding, while procreation destines posterity to being shackled. Devastate in order to rearrange and re-exploit! Epochal history is disclosed through this reorganization of beings and symbolic orders, which generate identity politics and let conflict erupt anew via what befalls upon us in doubting and cynically mocking our selfhood and humanity, even undoing it to be re-shackled. The higher-order more technically and cognitively equipped surveillance intelligence systems infiltrate lower-order ones while operationally manipulating them in concealment. ISIS is a disorderly intrinsic response within our epoch to an ordering Gestell. Its aggression counters the delivery of death through drones, cybernetics and robotics, or via planetary appropriative financial systems, by practicing cruelties against the flesh in face-to-face beheading, burning alive, drowning, crucifying, enslaving, stoning, and lynching. The human body becomes a carrier of bombs, delivering the violent act by hand, and against worldly embodiment in flesh. The brute responds in revengeful enmity to the technician against the background of warfare complex algorithms by cutting the flesh with the hand and blasting the body in suicide bombing while displaying the savagery via sophisticated media. Cruelties do not simply revive pre-modern forms of violence, since the modern epoch itself witnessed immeasurable crimes against humanity through the wrathful horrors of global and civil wars, genocides, and relentless oppressions. Violence has the character of being a primordial inheritance within human history, and this warns us that whomever fights the monster should not become monstrous, since looking long into the abyss lets the abysmal gaze back into us.20 DIVINITIES? The phenomenon of the death of the godhead, which evolved within European thought in the unfolding of the essence of technology, is resisted not only by reasoned disputation, critique, apologetics, or by adaptive or reactionary re-appropriations of a sense of the sacred, but through cultish violence as well. If hedonism, consumerism, and ecstatic entertainment are deployed individually and interpersonally to counter disenchanted alienation, as outcomes of what has been evacuated from our uprooted worldliness, and through a declared lived-condition of the ‘death of divinity’, then a radicalized affirmation of resistance is manifesting itself as an adventurous ferocity to the point of non-being. If the godhead died in de-divinizing consciousness,

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then for the zealot there is no ground upon which the ungodly would live. The life-world is exposed to the groundlessness of the nothing unto which mortals are held, as already destined to extinction not only individually but also collectively in devalued historical being. Overpowering others becomes another situation for projecting and displacing alienation, angst, shame, guilt, blame, hate, anger, and discontent. If this gathers momentum collectively, brutes come to presence with terrifying savagery. The victim is framed as an ‘infidel’ to be executed, or if ‘innocent’ then the killing act is a mere sacrifice to a deity who judges best (‘Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius’).21 Not only mortals are assaulted, but also the beckoning messengers of divinity in the coming of the godly to thought through the Name. The names of mercifulness and compassion that would otherwise initiate virtuous acts are instead uttered blasphemously while slaughtering a human being. The name-bearer is denied the meaningfulness of its name, and annihilated in consciousness via a negating ritual of human sacrifice that is also a form of cognitive deicidium (deicide). To act as such in the name of God rests on how the sect views its godhead, whether in anthropomorphic terms without arcana, or with fatalisms that do not contemplate divinity. A tension arises at the site of violence wherein the meaning of the divine names is emptied and the godhead is deadened in consciousness and conscience. If nihilism actualizes annihilation through a bottomless violence, the disintegration of ideals is already experienced in our era with silence and via the cynical retreat from being in their nearness. THE RESOURCEFUL The one who utters and acts in obedience to what commands, be it Gestell or religious revelation, is the one whose sayings aim at ordering others by overpowering them. The en-framed speak, think, and act in a commanding way via what holds sway over them in spreading what en-frames. They are the ones who overwhelm others into succumbing to Gestell or an en-framed reconstitution of revelation. The resourceful are those who stand as reserves to obey what orders and commands. Being resourceful is being in a better standing within the realm of what en-frames, but only as mere resources that gain power not by individuation rather via expediency in obeying the command with precision as technicians who evolve insofar they are answerable to technicity as destiny. You appear more successful and resourceful if you are ever readied to being en-framed. We are posited as inadequate or useless when we do not succumb to what commands from us a particular responsiveness to its technical calling, which is unlike what calls for thought in the arts and letters, even though



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they are also being gradually assimilated within what en-frames. The more shackled the better readied you are to obey with efficiency what commands functionality and the unhindered smoothness in the unfurling of logistics. This happens in concealment not only institutionally but also via the conduits of our fascination with curiosities, leisure, fetishes, or commodious living. Being liberated from Gestell is being exposed to uselessness and a lack of resources, hence becoming prospectively or actually unemployable, unskilled, inefficient, disorderly, and even irresponsible in not being responsive to what commands. If unsheltered then becoming at best a castaway. I am pitted against myself to adapt in this situational flux under the guise of self-transcendence, and by bearing the burdens of duty with patience rather than a claim of courage.22 The acuteness of such circumstances is evident via technologies that exceed cybernetic audiovisuals and kinetics by remoteness, since we are not readied yet to think about the implications of Artificial Intelligence, biomimetic multi-modal robotics, android-Geminoids,23 bionics and genetics. A philosopher who is focused on technical logistics fulfils the design of Gestell while being oblivious in their work of their own existential unrelieved crisis. What is omitted from such abstractive philosophy is the question of being, and as such philosophizing is turned into an exercise in syntax that reveals inadequacies and awkwardness in thinking about affective lived experiences. A critical stance with regard to what holds sway via Gestell grasps thinking as a way of being-in-the-world. Even the artwork that is not amenable to being acquired by collectors for sheer display, and that can only appear in exhibition spaces, is itself appropriated by curators for calculative market transactions and value placements, despite being lifted out of utility. Its uselessness is turned into a monetary value within the circles of art curating and criticism, and in the domain of marketability of culture in institutional frameworks, hence branding it as what is resourceful in transactions. In spite of Gestell, one is not entrapped in being always shackled by a chain of command in obeying orders, for some might have the slim chance and choice of becoming out of order, out of line and rebel, even if ultimately suffering from the consequences. Seeking refuge in religion with its seeming sense of liberation is being ceded to another mode of commandment under a reconstituted religiosity that is en-framed, hence failing to recognize that what is revelatory in the religious sense is already overwhelmed by Gestell. The calling of art comes forth in this context from the essence of setting – upon – itself – into – work of the advent of truth, which opens a region for the bestowal of poetic dwelling.24 This summons the bringing of art into its essence as what arises out of itself, wherein beauty gets revealed as one of the names for the happening of truth, albeit without presupposing the historical ties of art to religiosity.25

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THE FACE Gestell commands beings as standing-reserve and turns the All into what is equal and same in being disposable, while conscience calls for responsiveness to authentic being of self and other. The face orders me to be responsible cum responsive, and ideally being so without reciprocal expectation, symmetrical relation, and with hospitality.26 Letting the face appear commands: ‘Thou shalt not kill’, unlike the commandment of Gestell as a prevailing mode of revealing truth. The disappearance of the face lets its bearer potentially appear as a throwaway with indifference. The religious can let the face disappear in discursive as well as embodied experience under the pressure of confessional nomoi and the social conditioning of conforming to them by conviction or by abusive peer deontological pressure, especially wherein extremism reigns. If the real in flesh is experienced as simulacrum, and the virtual is turned hyper-real, then the existential lived quotidian face to face with the other is compromised.27 Technicity removes the face, and en-framed religiosity is overwhelmed by what frames it, whereby in the case of extremist radicalization gruesome killings take place face to face despite the traditionalist religious prohibitions. The cult of violence amplifies the horror by giving the carnage a personalized face then delighting in defacing it. Such act is disseminated via the visual culture of reproducing the image in cybernetics, lessening the reality of the face and its dignified presence in flesh, simulating it via manifold recycled digital viewings and repeating the spectacle of defacement within desensitizing audio-visual media. The origin as a unique human who is a face-bearer disappears when such simulacra underpin the perceived reality. The military technician who delivers death through drone algorithms does not see a face, or imagines it without concreteness in targeted identity, while the suicide bomber and the slaughterer by hand gaze at the face with immediacy in view of disfiguring it. Nihilism lets the beast rise in the territory of indifference by commanding obedience to what calls for killing in a confluence of the positive ordering of religion and technique; for both proceed as posures with regard to their respective positum. What religiosity in its en-framed uprootedness aims to restore as fragmented tradition, of what has been removed from our world by the essence of modern technicity, can no longer be reinstated in the way it was. If Gestell turns beings into standing-reserve, or techno-science studies them as aggregates of sub-atomic particles, revealed Abrahamic monotheism posits them metaphysically as contingent created beings. Albeit, the contingent is ontologically neutral, since it can either be or not be without entailing a contradiction, while the impossible does not exist by necessity, and the necessary cannot but exist.28 Under such circumstances we need to go beyond empathy or symmetrical reciprocity via a hospitable clearing that liberates



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beings from their shackles by letting them be, which from our situational lifeworld looks insane to the realist in its openness that promises replacement (Gelassenheit) in willing not to will, and in being freed from our designs into things. This calls for rethinking how to dwell on earth anew, despite what effaces the poetic and exposes us to homelessness and displacement. In a Heideggerian take on the Ars poetica of Aristotle (1451b, 5–6),29 poiēsis is more philosophic and of graver import than inquiry as historia, since it enunciates universals rather than particulars. Art is generated in our epoch against the background of the essence of technology in reflection of its intimate historical connections with material and intellectual techniques. Art is itself determined in many of its forms by technical executions besides its potential of being poetical or touched by a bent on religiosity. Art integrated the possibility of revealing in a poetizing manner that is underpinned by technique as well as serving religions in its longstanding history, and through architectural forms that opened up a cleared leeway for admitting the fourfold (divinities, mortals, sky, earth) to let dwelling be. The distinction is not between art and technique, rather what distinguishes the artist from the technician is that the former surpasses the latter in the finality of the work. The technician fulfils the purpose of the work through its functioning as a product of engineering and technique, while the artwork that emerges via technical execution desires the presence of the beautiful even as artifice.30 Revealing lays claim here to art more originally than the confluence of religion with techno-science in the manner the poetic pervades revelation in the essential unfolding with exaltedness into the beautiful. The question to be thought remains that of the joy and mystery (Geheimnis) of homecoming (Heimkunft), namely to live despite our uprooted fragmentations on earth as Earth, and think ever anew about what presides over our fundamental relation to being, its meaning, truth, and place. SENSELESSNESS If being for the other is the basis of ethics, it also brings about anguish, regret, sorrow, jealousy, coveting, shame and guilt, besides the gladdening moments of pride, honour, loyalty, and worthiness. Being ethical is an inner struggle (jihad al-nafs) that is generative of meaning despite the meaninglessness that results from a nihilist devaluing of values. A silent sacrifice overcomes suffering by patience and the satisfaction from sheltering those in our care. Being responsible cum responsive can turn into an internalized strife with burdens that coil back as senselessness in duty. The affirmation of life arises poignantly when facing non-being, not simply with a passive underlying angst but by surviving what causes death via attachments to being. Devaluing hospitality, charity, patience, and sternness

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in the face of adversity undermines the courage-to-be. Rather than affirming being despite it all, or surrendering the self to desiring non-being, a rampage of self-annihilation is unleashed revengefully as a displaced punishing assault on blamed others. The senseless violence is given directionality through its own thrust as a seemingly meaning-giving act despite its arbitrariness, whereby the perpetrator justifies the criminal act by positing it as what transcends debased criminality in being an event that ruptures the sense of history, especially if pictured by the agent of violence as a phenomenon of martyrdom. Such indoctrination pierces through worldly temporality by aiming at an eternal otherworldliness. Inner-worldly phenomena are posited as mere appearances that veil a concealed afterlife as ultimate reality. The everydayness of being-in-the-world that is normally faced with patience, toil and labour, anguish, dread, regret, anger or hopefulness that comes with the occasional pleasure of respite or relief, is metamorphosed into a realm that is no longer bearable, especially if depreciated in the value of its reality and seen as a mere veil for what would ultimately be an eternal life of immortality, with abundance of reward. Existential angst and suicidal thought are metamorphosed into revengeful hate, which is imagined as being rewarded through a salvific rupturing transcendence by transiting with avenging rampage to the afterlife via a violent severance from worldliness. Unlike the perceived prospects of reward in self-sacrifice for a nationalist, patriotic, proletarian or even anarchic cause, which are inner-worldly as traces in collective memory that can prospectively receive a place within recorded history as demarcations of honour, pride, altruism, loyalty, the act of what is religiously pictured as martyrdom carries the belief in otherworldly immeasurable recompenses in eternal meta-realities. The thrust of being-towards-death is opened up to an afterlife rather than being closed by finite historical temporality. This picture rests on scriptural exegesis or hermeneutics that validates what constitutes martyrdom versus condemning suicide or murder. Besides the depreciation of worldly reality through a disenchanted take on it from deeply rooted onto-theologies, the erosion of compassion, empathy, reverence and devotion is practised via contemporary mass media as an anonymity that defaces, in addition to global wars that are managed via impersonal bureaucracies that are de-humanizing in rule following. In the age of Gestell, a forceful yet frustrated attempt to unintentionally overcome what is dysfunctional in society recoils in the form of revengeful and intended violence against the status quo. Exiting the realm of the en-framed is seemingly only delivering the self and other to non-being. This deepens the consequences of Gestell by devaluing worldliness. If Gestell turns beings into objectless Bestand, then nothingness is sought in the name of submitting to the absoluteness of the one singular necessary being as a divinity in an epoch of radical de-divinization, wherein such godhead saves by annihilation. For



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where the nihil rules, the accompanying godliness annihilates. The en-framed godhead contrasts the sense of the Holy that emerges from the simplicity of earthy experiences in our worldly being in the flesh as naturalized by poetizing dwelling on earth. The spiritual affects of being-in-the-world disclose the happening of transcendence via earthly life as sheltered in being-in-the-flesh of a mortal. The arrival of divinities is measured by the coming of harvest that grants bounties with providence, and grace in health, while their flight signals draught, harshness, want, misery or malady. It is like the comings and goings of seasons, day and night, which open earthiness to the heavenly vault, to sunlight, heat and warmth, rain and richness in earthy soil, and what brings forth life with abundance or takes it away, as also apportioned by the patient labour and toil of mortals, and the joys of surviving and conquering wants, the granting and withdrawal of being. Our quest for homecoming in the territory of technicity is labyrinthine and perilous since we might not find again a way to dwell under the threat of a devastation of earth (Verwüstung der Erde).31 We are unable to ignore the calling of technique as what unlocks resources in humanity and nature, and yet a thoughtful engagement with its essence ought to be mindful to how we continue to shepherd being. We attend and listen to what sets itself upon us in a commanding manner, without being ever readied to obey what it destines our way, so that it does not become fateful. NOTES 1 Martin Heidegger, ‘Bauen Wohnen Denken’ (‘Building Dwelling Thinking’), in Vorträge und Aufsätze (GA7), ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000), 145–164. 2 I treated this theme in Nader El-Bizri, ‘Being-towards-death: On Martyrdom and Islam’, Cristianesimo nella storia: ricerche storiche esegetiche teologiche 27 (2006): 249–79. 3 Heidegger, ‘Die Frage nach der Technik’, in Vorträge und Aufsätze, 23–28. The appellation ‘Gestell’ has various renderings in English, including the expression ‘en-­framing’, which is one of the earliest renditions, and I adopted it via the designator ‘en-­framed’ given its accrued usages in Heideggerian studies. There are other significant translations with neologism such as ‘po-sure’, ‘chassis’, ‘entrapment’, ‘positionality’, ‘conscription’, and ‘framework’; see, for instance, Martin Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 2012), xi. 4 Noman Benotman and Nikita Malik, The Children of Islamic State (London: Quilliam Foundation, 2016). 5 Yet ‘there is no compulsion in religion’ (Qur’an, al-Baqara 2:256). 6 Albeit ‘whoever slays a soul for other than a soul, or for corruption in the land, it shall be as if he had slain humankind altogether; and whoever saves the life of one, it shall be as if he saved the life of all humanity’ (Qur’an, al-Ma’ida 5:32).

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7 Post-colonial critique can be bracketed herein by testifying that architectonic traces of Nimrud City are preserved for posterity outside the original site at the British Museum due to the efforts of Orientalist archaeologists. 8 Tarif Khalidi, ‘The Poetry of the Khawarij: Violence and Salvation’, in Religion between Violence and Reconciliation, ed. Thomas Scheffler (Beirut and Würzburg: Orient-Institut/Ergon-Verlag, 2002), 109–22. 9 Toshihiko Izutsu, Concept of Belief in Islamic Theology (Kuala Lumpur and New York: Islamic Book Trust – The Other Press, 2001), 55–59; and Cyril Glassé, The New Encyclopedia of Islam (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 330–31. 10 Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra IV.76: Unter Töchtern der Wüste, in Werke in drei Bänden, Band 2, ed. Wolfgang Deninger (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1954), 1243. 11 Myriam François-Cerrah, ‘Islamic State Wants to Divide the World into Jihadists and Crusaders’, The Telegraph, 18 November 2015, accessed 19 August 2016, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/islamic-state/12002726/Thegrey-zone-How-Isis-wants-to-divide-the-world-into-Muslims-and-crusaders.html. 12 Martin Heidegger, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens (Pfullingen: Günther Neske Verlag, 1954), 19. 13 Despite the summoning to ‘indulge with forgiveness and enjoin kindness’ (Qur’an, al-A‘raf 7:199). 14 The Qur’an is misread by charlatans who ‘pervert words from their contexts, and disregard a portion of what they were reminded of’ (Qur’an, al-Ma’ida 5:13). 15 Jon Henley, ‘Captagon: The Amphetamine Fuelling Syria’s War’, The Guardian, 13 January 2014, accessed August 16, 2016, bhttps://www.theguardian.com/ world/shortcuts/2014/jan/13/captagon-amphetamine-syria-war-middle-east. 16 However ‘God forgives all sins. Truly He is the Forgiving’ (Qur’an, al-Zumar 39:53). 17 I addressed this question in Nader El-Bizri, ‘God: Essence and Attributes’, in The Cambridge Companion to Classical Islamic Theology, ed. Tim Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 121–40. 18 Qur’an, Al Omran 3:110. 19 To echo Rilke despite the perversions of our age: ‘Jetzt war es Zeit, daβ Götter träten aus bewohnten Dingen’. Rainer Maria Rilke, Gesammelte Werke, Band II (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1930), 185. 20 Echoing: ‘Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein’. Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Leipzig: C.G. Naumann, 1886), Aphorism 98, 146. 21 ‘Kill them. “For the Lord knoweth them who are His”!’ (Fragmentary take on Epistle II of Timothy 2:19). During the 1209 Albigensian crusade under Pope Innocent III to sack the Cathar town of Béziers, it is reported that the Apostolic legate and Cistercian Abbot, Arnaud Amalric, enjoined the crusaders to slaughter the inhabitants without worrying that Catholics might perish besides heretics on the account that God will sort them out. 22 Nader El-Bizri, ‘Ontological Meditations on Tillich and Heidegger’, Iris: Annales de Philosophie 36 (2015): 109–14.



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23 ‘Robotics at Osaka University, Japan’, accessed 16 August 2016, http://www. geminoid.jp. 24 As addressed in Heidegger’s lectures of 1935 and 1936 in Freiburg and Zürich, respectively, entitled ‘Das Ding’ (‘The Thing’) and ‘Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes’ (‘The Origin of the Work of Art’). 25 In Philokalia ‘beauty’ is one of the names for the happening of truth as unveiling, and in Islam, the ‘Beautiful’ (al-Jamil) is one of the ninety-nine ‘Names of God’ (Asma’ Allah al-husna). 26 I treated this question in Nader El-Bizri, ‘Uneasy Meditations Following Levinas’, Studia Phaenomenologica 6 (2006): 293–315. 27 The post-modern era being a domain of simulacra that turn the simulated environment into hyper-reality. See Jean Baudrillard, Simulacres et simulation (Paris: Galilée, 1981), 9–10. 28 I discussed this in Nader El-Bizri, The Phenomenological Quest between Avicenna and Heidegger (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 2014); Nader El-Bizri, ‘Avicenna and Essentialism’, Review of Metaphysics 54 (2001): 753–78; and Nader El-Bizri, ‘Being and Necessity: A Phenomenological Investigation of Avicenna’s Metaphysics and Cosmology’, in Islamic Philosophy and Occidental Phenomenology on the Perennial Issue of Microcosm and Macrocosm, ed. AnnaTeresa Tymieniecka (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2006), 243–61. 29 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Stephen Halliwell, Loeb Classical Library 199 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 30 Pierre Francastel, Art et technique aux XIXe et XXe siècles (Paris: Gallimard, 1956), 266–67. 31 Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze, 71.

Chapter 3

Environmental (In)Action in the Age of the World Picture Peter Lucas

Photographs of the earth from space – in particular the earthrise photo of Apollo 8 – have an important place in the iconography of the modern environmental movement. The movement began to gather pace and gain a sense of its own identity in the late nineteen sixties, coinciding with the availability, for the first time, of photographs of the whole earth. The privilege of actually viewing the earth from space was confined to just a few individuals, but the photographs they captured quickly became available to campaigners and their opponents alike. One influential line of argument sees these photographs as a key catalyst in the process by which the modern environmental movement took shape.1 Standard accounts tend to paint the availability of these images in an entirely positive light – as if the availability of images of the earth from space could not but be socially and politically beneficial.2 Indeed, the positive environmentalist response to these images has been so pronounced that anyone inclined to portray their impact in a negative light might be thought to be, to that extent at least, an ‘enemy’ of environmentalism. Notoriously, Martin Heidegger’s 1966 Der Spiegel interview sounded just such a pessimistic note: I don’t know if you were shocked, but [certainly] I was shocked when a short time ago I saw the pictures of the earth taken from the moon. We don’t need atomic bombs at all [to uproot us] – the uprooting of man is already here. All our relationships have become merely technical ones. It is no longer upon an earth that man lives today.3

How then should we view Heidegger’s remarks? Is he, as he may initially appear to be, an ‘enemy’ of the global social and political movement that flared into self-conscious existence under the influence of these images? Or is the malaise to which he calls attention in these remarks properly regarded 63

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as a matter of urgent concern for environmentalists themselves? This essay has its origins in an attempt to understand the nature and practical import of Heidegger’s disquiet. To this end, I begin by discussing a phenomenon, introduce an idea, and end with a question. The phenomenon in question is the remarkable level of inaction – amounting almost to a kind of paralysis – that appears to have afflicted both governments and popular environmental campaigning organizations in the face of severe and mounting environmental problems, in the half-century since the images of the earth from space became generally available, and Heidegger’s remarks were made. The idea is Heidegger’s conception of consciousness as (in a sense to be explained later) an intentional reaching out to things. Associated with this is an interpretation of ‘alienation’ such that alienation does not simply involve misunderstanding ourselves (e.g., as mere ‘human resources’), but also involves misunderstanding our environment (again, perhaps as a mere resource; i.e., as ‘standing-reserve’). Not simply alienation then, but ‘world alienation’. The question is: to what extent does Heidegger’s later philosophy enable us to understand this concept of ‘world alienation’ in a manner that speaks, inter alia, to the challenges facing the modern environmental movement? The answer I will hazard is that Heidegger’s notion of ‘enframing’ [das Ge-Stell], interpreted as a form of world alienation, is extremely fruitful for understanding both contemporary global environmental inaction and the more general social and existential conditions in which contemporary political struggles unfold.4 THE PHENOMENON In an article published over twenty years ago, Chris Rose, the then programme director of Greenpeace UK, expressed his concern that environmental action seemed to be stalled. The problem the environmental campaigners faced was not that of proving that there was an environmental crisis; instead, it was that of moving beyond proof to action. Campaigning groups had all the evidence of crisis they apparently needed, and they had had it for years. Even at that time, governments and large corporations did not generally dispute the evidence. The problem was that evidence of the problems, and insight into the problems, was not translating into action.5 Anyone with a sense of the history of the modern environmental movement will recognise the concern. In the latter decades of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first, the developing political awareness of the generations and individuals who now occupy the political positions of greatest



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influence globally has coincided with the rise of global environmental awareness. Our political leaders and their electorates, our captains of industry, business leaders and their customers have never really known a world without widespread environmental concern and vociferous environmental campaigning.6 Yet the generations that have grown up with environmentalism, whose representatives have reached a position of power and influence, such that they might reasonably have been expected to act on its insights, have notably failed to do what we all know to be both technically possible and practically necessary to preserve a safe, wholesome, stable and beautiful environment for ourselves and our descendants (minimize unnecessary energy use, especially the inessential use of fossil fuels; reduce the rate of consumption and move to safe renewables where possible; change the direction of our consumerist culture in favour of low-consumption lifestyles; reduce, reuse, recycle as much as we can etc. etc.).7 In the twenty years since Rose published his piece, aside from having slightly more efficient cars on the road (but many more cars generally), and recycling a higher proportion of our waste (but producing much more waste in total), we in the developed world hardly seem to have slowed the pace of detrimental change, let alone made positive progress.8 Why then, given the very comfortable and privileged world of plenty that we inhabit, and knowing that we can and must make changes, are we so notably failing to do so? A plausible theory would say that it is not really up to the decisions and actions of individuals. Ordinary people can have virtually no impact on global environmental problems. Even politicians are quite powerless to resist the blind play of economic forces and the cancerous growth of capital that dictates that the frantic overproduction of disposable consumer goods destined simply to be bought and thrown away will continue year on year. It is a view. But we are the consumers. We have the information we need to make different decisions. Why are we not making them? According to Rose, the problem is that of making things ‘real’. We know that the crisis is happening, and we know that is happening to us, and to ‘our planet’. But somehow this does not add up to the perception that it is actually happening here, now, and to us. It is, as Rose puts it (in a phrase that already seems anachronistic), as if it was all happening in the ‘virtual reality’ of TV: [E]nvironmental problems tended to gain a media-only reality, adding to the impression that ‘it’s all on TV – it’s serious, but not much to do with me’. Greenpeace and environmental problems were ‘out-there’, wherever that luminous world was, somewhere down the cathode ray tube.9

The CRTs may in the meantime have been replaced with LCD and plasma screens, TV news bulletins with online news feeds, but the problem remains

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recognizable. Rose is particularly concerned that some of the methods chosen by environmental campaigning groups have backfired, inasmuch as they have turned the paradigmatic environmental action into a media event. The logic says that if you perform some symbolic environmental intervention (steering an inflatable boat between a whaler and the whale, attempting to block a waste discharge pipeline, commandeering a train supplying a coal-fired power station) you have to have the media on hand. If it is not reported, if it has not happened as a media event, it might as well not have happened at all. Manipulation of the media is an effective way to get the message across. But the paradox is that what then ‘happens’ happens first and foremost as a news event. To be effective, the event must occur in the ‘unreal world’ of the media. When we make it thus unreal, the action is in danger of becoming self-defeating. Perhaps that puts the point too starkly. The media event has its own distinctive effects, of course. It has symbolic value, it engages people’s attention and their emotions, it raises the profile of the issues and the organizations that campaign on them. But as a media event, it at the same time begins to look counterproductive. If people come to associate environmental action primarily with what happens in the world of the media, the real potential to promote acts of environmental responsibility/action/confrontation appears to be dissipated. The TV world is in danger. Of course we should do what we can . . . But meanwhile we can continue to live as we like, to buy and sell and produce and consume, as we like, because what is happening is not happening to the real world – the world in which we live. Arguably, the crisis that Rose identifies is less a political one than a philosophical one. More specifically, an ontological one. It might reasonably be questioned whether the very general malaise that Rose identifies is fully explained by a less-than-perfect choice of campaigning tactics. If the media presentation of environmental issues is in present circumstances the crucial factor in our environmental inaction, is there something about those circumstances – something deeper, more enduring and more pervasive – that conditions us to respond in just such a way? We know that there are urgent problems that demand action, but we struggle to see those problems as ‘real’. THE IDEA In their general shape, the concerns Rose identifies seem to be prefigured in Heidegger’s remarks concerning the photographs of the earth from space. Environmentalists have made much of the positive impact of the slightly later (1968) ‘Earthrise’ photos. From the first moment we were able to view the whole earth from a vantage point that brought out its fragility and isolation,



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we could stand back and look at the system on which we all depend and view it as a single, interconnected whole.10 But as the earthrise image travelled around the world and was processed through the media apparatus it may have had another countervailing consequence. Intellectually of course we know that the photo is of the earth that we inhabit. But as it became a recognizable icon did it not come to represent some ‘elsewhere’? An elsewhere that was at the centre of environmental concern, but not really the earth on which we live. Is the ultimate effect of such images an alienating one, as the transformation of environmental action into media symbols is alienating, along broadly the lines that Heidegger’s ominous remarks suggest? The symbolic connection seems straightforward, but can it also be explicated more deeply and more thoroughly? When Heidegger declares that we only have technological conditions left his remark clearly has relevance to the increasing technological dependence of modern life – a tendency that has intensified very considerably since the time of his remarks. In response, the Spiegel interviewer voices a common critical reaction: the increased technologization of modern life is not a problem, but a blessing. After all, ‘everything functions’. The instrumental power of organized human activity is vastly increased from what it was a century ago, in terms of both efficacy and efficiency. We have an unprecedented technical capability to ameliorate and correct environmental problems – to get them ‘in hand’. Surely that is something to be celebrated rather than regretted? In response, Heidegger remarks ‘precisely . . . everything functions’, as if functioning were itself a problem.11 But if our technological might and efficiency has itself become a problem, why is it a problem, and what sort of problem is it? A decade prior to the Spiegel interview Heidegger had identified an ontological crisis facing modern humanity, in the thematically interconnected set of essays ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, and ‘Science and Reflection’.12 In these essays Heidegger discusses the ‘enframing’ that is characteristic of modern science and technology, ‘setting upon’ nature and ‘challenging it forth’.13 If Heidegger’s concerns here related purely to the instrumental treatment of nature they would have clear environmental relevance, but their significance would perhaps be debateable. Suppose that modern technology is essentially characterized by an aggressive appropriation of natural resources. While those of a preservationist mentality might be alarmed, those whose concerns are more classically conservationist (for whom the watchword is not the preservation of nature but its wise use) could perhaps afford to be more relaxed. As long as ‘everything functions’ – both artificial social and economic systems, and the natural systems on which they depend – why should we worry? For conservationists of this sort, it is not functioning but malfunctioning we should be worried about, not ‘use’ but ‘unwise use’.

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Nevertheless, as the above essays make clear, the all-enveloping and ‘conscriptive’ use of nature would be regarded as problematic by Heidegger. This is because it is compatible with, and indeed consequent upon, a specific maldevelopment in our ‘theory of the real’.14 For Heidegger, the enframing that is characteristic of our technological civilization is not fundamentally an instrumentalization of nature but an objectification of it. In the context of inter-human ethics, ‘objectification’ is often understood as effectively a synonym for instrumentalization. For example, one may be held to objectify a research subject when one treats them as no more than an instrument – an extension of the experimental apparatus. But such a reduction to the status of a means would appear to be possible without a strict reduction to the status of an object. There seems to be nothing to prevent one continuing to regard someone as a person, even while one treats her as an instrument. This is precisely the potential treatment of humanity as a ‘means’ that is the focus of Kant’s categorical imperative in its ‘formula of the end in itself’ variant.15 The practical application of this principle would have to be radically rethought if it were to be the case that the treatment of another as a means entailed understanding them as an object rather than a person. The instrumental treatment of human beings seems to be possible without any accompanying objectification of them; similarly, the instrumental treatment of non-human nature seems possible without the objectification of nature – without understanding nature as nothing more than an object (or a concatenation of objects). The concern then is not so much with the instrumentalization of nature per se as with the objectification that accompanies and sustains such instrumentalization. The roots of this objectification, on Heidegger’s account, lie in the theory of the real that underlies modern technology. And the theory of the real that underlies modern technology is, Heidegger tells us, that of modern mathematical physics.16 For modern physics, what is ‘real’ is what is ‘measurable’. More specifically, what can be assimilated to the most universal and comprehensive mathematical model of nature, laid down in advance.17 This view is explicitly set out in Descartes’s ‘Fifth Meditation’, in which the ‘essence’ of material things is articulated in terms of their mathematizable features – size, shape, position, motion and duration.18 The roughly contemporaneous scientific discoveries of Galileo provide an apt illustration of such a view in practice.19 Galileo’s law of falling bodies describes the characteristic behaviour of any uniformly accelerated body travelling close to the earth’s surface. The law does not purport simply to model physical processes mathematically. It is not that the law has the status of, for example a mechanical model – a practical analogue of the process, useful for purposes of prediction and control. Rather, the law purports to present the process as it is in itself. Shorn of its perceptible



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accompaniments, the process just is the mathematically expressible series of developments that the law articulates. Thus the scientific mathematical model has a status quite different from that of a mechanical model: it grasps the essence of the physical process a priori. This way of understanding nature is summed up in Galileo’s famous remark that the book of nature is written ‘in mathematical language, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures’.20 Allegedly, what mathematical physics succeeds in capturing are not the accidental features of physical processes whose perceptible accompaniments are due to our species-specific perceptual apparatus, but the character of those processes in themselves. When mathematical physics frames its mathematical laws it does so in nature’s own language. In this connection, Heidegger quotes Max Planck’s dictum ‘that is real which can be measured’.21 Planck’s remark is unfortunately ambiguous. It might be interpreted to mean – plausibly enough – that everything that is real should have a measurable aspect. That is to say, that we will not regard anything is real unless it has some mathematizable features. But actually the Galileian view outlined above implies a much more challenging view. It implies that any features of an object that are not mathematizable are not real. It is this stronger version of the view that is relevant to Heidegger’s concerns. For Planck as for Galileo, it is not simply that real processes must have measurable features, but that only the mathematizable features of any given phenomenon will be regarded as real. For such a view, grasping reality just is grasping the means of its successful mathematical articulation. The maldevelopment of the modern theory of the real thus includes, for Heidegger, something more ontologically significant than just the rise of a rather brutally instrumentalist approach to the exploitation of natural resources. For the modern era ‘real’ will mean, simply: recognized and articulated in the best contemporary theories of mathematical physics. The ‘Age of the World Picture’ is not the age of competing ‘world views’ – one of which happens to be the world view of modern mathematical physics – but the age in which physical phenomena in general are regarded as real to the precise extent that they can be articulated within the pre-prepared theoretical framework of mathematical science. The significance of the modern period’s objectification of nature is compounded, on Heidegger’s account, by the corresponding transformation that has taken place in our understanding of the notions of the ‘subject’ and the ‘object’. For Medieval philosophy, under the overriding influence of Aristotle’s metaphysics, an individual physical thing was not an ‘object’ but ‘subjectum’ – a substance. Aristotelian substances are not the ‘stuff’ of modern physics and chemistry (e.g., chemical compounds), but individual nameable, changeable things. Their ‘subject’ character is rooted in their susceptibility to the processes associated with efficient causation – undergoing change,

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growth, decay etc.; their capacity to be re-identifiable over time; and their capacity to be identified as individual members of species and genera. By contrast, an ‘object’ is for Medieval philosophy the object of thought – accessible to the intellect but not to the senses and preserved from the vagaries of efficient causation, growth and decay. Paradigm objects might thus be a golden mountain, a Euclidean circle etc. In his 1962 essay ‘Modern Science Metaphysics and Mathematics’ Heidegger traces the dramatic transformation in the meaning of these terms – amounting almost to an inversion – that took place at the beginning of the modern period.22 This development can again be clearly traced in the philosophy of Descartes. In pursuit of his foundationalist epistemological project, Descartes finds it expedient to subject all of his beliefs to radical doubt. Under the impact of this doubt, the existence of every Aristotelian ‘subject’ is called into question. Since nothing can be known with certainty about such subjects their existence must be bracketed. They are no longer suitable foci of scientific investigation. The sole exception is the thinker himself. Descartes finds that it is simply incoherent to apply his strategy of doubt to his own existence. Henceforth then he must regard himself as the only subject whose existence is assured – as the subject – and he must regard his various mental representations as, at best, evidence of what lies beyond his own thought. The former Aristotelian world of natural substances is reduced at a stroke to an array of objects in the mind of an isolated subject. The subject himself does not emerge unscathed from this process. The subject is no longer a recognizable Aristotelian subject – an animated body, for which thought, perception and imagination go hand in hand with the bodily processes of nutrition and locomotion. Rather, the subject is now the mind – the thinker and his thoughts, radically separated from everything involving the body.23 Descartes’s ontology thus presents us with a literal objectification of the world of natural things. The familiar inhabitants of the physical world, known to us through the senses, must henceforth be regarded – for scientific purposes at least – as objects in the mind of the subject. Tracing the above transformation serves to explain why it is that the objectification of nature is accompanied in modern thought by a simultaneous subjectification of humanity. Epistemologically speaking, the systematic reduction of the world of natural substances to their mathematizable essence, perfectly representable as a system of mathematical shapes in motion, is the rational outcome of the Cartesian turn to the subject. As Heidegger puts the point, ‘That the world becomes picture is one and the same with the event of man’s becoming subiectum in the midst of that which is’.24 However, the subjectification of humanity comes at a significant price. In the ‘Age of the World Picture’ measurability and mathematical articulability become the touchstone of reality. But mathematical articulation requires



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representation, and representation requires a representer – the picture must be a picture for someone (since what is not represented to anyone is not represented at all). Not every subject can be eliminated then. If what is real is what is posited by mathematical physics then something must be doing the positing – something which must be forever outside of the system posited, and which must therefore partake in some other order of reality. The objectification of nature is inseparable from the subjectification of humanity, and the more comprehensively the world is grasped as picture the more stubbornly the modern subject comes to haunt our theory of the real as the indigestible and ungraspable foundation of the entire epistemic system. Our examination of Heidegger’s critique of the modern theory of the real has led us by turns to examine the Galileian mathematization of nature and the Cartesian objectification/subjectification of nature and humanity. What this serves to highlight is that the malaise that is characteristic of the ‘Age of the World Picture’ bears not only on the character of modern physical science but also on the view of the subject and of consciousness that underlies it. Without some such view of consciousness the objectification of nature outlined above would not have been tenable. Galileo’s claims concerning the mathematical essence of natural things depend crucially on his claims concerning the subjective origins of the non-mathematical qualitative features of nature as we experience it – a topic that he deals with at some length in The Assayer. According to Galileo, the sense-specific qualities of physical objects are not in those objects themselves but in us. The mathematizable features of size, shape, position and movement are really there in nature. But the sense-specific features – tastes, smells, sounds, colours and felt qualities like heat and cold – are really in us; they are features of the perceiver rather than the perceived. Correspondingly, the Cartesian ‘objectification’ of nature is predicated on a revolutionary view of the mind according to which, while we must doubt the reliability of the senses, we have privileged and uniquely reliable access to our own mental representations. On Heidegger’s account then our modern malaise at least partly reflects a problematic conception of the self and of consciousness. Considering how this malaise might be addressed in turn involves a revised view of the selfworld relation and an alternative to the views of consciousness that have dominated modern epistemology since the early modern period. Grasping the promise of Heidegger’s alternative requires us to revisit key themes of his earlier philosophy – in particular the central notion of being-in-the-world. Heidegger’s notion of being-in-the-world is not straightforwardly a notion of ‘consciousness’ as that term might be understood in, say, the contemporary field of consciousness studies.25 But it nevertheless implies a view of consciousness – one that differs radically from the familiar Cartesian model. For Heidegger, our being-in-the-world is not a matter of the subject’s internal

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representation of supposedly external mathematizable objects (nor a fortiori is knowledge a matter of the adequacy of those internal representations). Rather, the primary characteristic of Dasein – the being that we each are – is that Dasein has a world. Our being is being-in-the-world and our consciousness is an intentional reaching out to things.26 It is easy to miss the simultaneous subtlety and radicality of Heidegger’s claim here. Heidegger is by no means denying the familiar features of our supposedly ‘inner’ life. Instead, he is contesting the conclusion that the inner life can coherently be regarded as essentially ‘inner’ – as the inner life of a Cartesian subject. What is most remarkable about Dasein is not that it is blessed with an inside (‘consciousness’), but that unlike mere physical things it is intentionally connected to an outside. What we term ‘consciousness’ is at the most basic level the capacity to surpass our own physical boundaries in thought and experience. Beings like ourselves are not isolated, either from each other, or from the physical things with which we deal. We are not trapped inside our own heads, never to bridge the gap to the world outside. Dasein is always already outside of itself in a world. When a human being is in a forest they are in the forest in a way that no tree could ever be, though it lives and dies there. It is possible to imagine a tree apart from the forest, but it is not possible to imagine a human being apart from his/her world – though we might misunderstand our world we can never escape or fall out of it. In the 1954 essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ Heidegger explores some of the ways in which the inextricable link with things that characterizes Dasein is inflected under various social conditions.27 An eighteenth-century Black Forest farmhouse embodies in all of its features the intentional life of the family that dwelt there. From the placement of the house on the southfacing slope close to a supply of fresh water, to the pitch of the roof designed to shed snow, to the shelter provided to the bedrooms, the entire structure bespeaks the maintenance of the peasant way of life. By contrast, a modern industrial building such as a power station provides for the physical needs of its workforce, but not in such a way that the workforce could ever be said to be at home there. The power station engineers return home from their shift to good quality modern homes that are well-planned, affordable, easy to maintain, and open to air, light and sun. But it is questionable whether such homes are really dwellings. FROM DWELLING TO WORLD ALIENATION Our unparalleled ability to build, which has developed hand in hand with an increasing inability to dwell, is, for Heidegger a measure of our contemporary alienation.28 The concept of alienation has a philosophical and political



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history stretching back to Marx. Marx was concerned that workers under capitalism, who have no choice but to survive by selling their own labour power, suffer alienation.29 They misunderstand and misjudge themselves, and this misunderstanding both facilitates and directly contributes to their continued oppression. If I understand my labour power as a commodity, and I define myself through my labour, it is but a small step to understanding myself as a commodity. In my working life, my conditions of employment are managed by a department of ‘human resources’. I am one of the ‘resources’ they manage. But once I regard myself as a resource my attitude to my work, and my life outside of work, will change. Instead of trying to integrate my work with my wider life goals, such that my work becomes meaningful in itself – a coherent element in a flourishing and recognizably human life – I will regard it, and its products, in purely instrumental terms: a means to an end, a total sacrifice of the relevant hours of my life for the sake of external goods. Marx was of course concerned with ending oppressive labour conditions. But his main concern was not merely with shortening the working week, assuring employment rights etc., but with humanizing work, so that it could form a rationally comprehensible part of a decent human existence. This concern with alienating social conditions has been taken up and modified by subsequent generations of philosophers, though not without various shifts of emphasis. A key shift of emphasis is to look beyond the problems attending the ways in which we interpret ourselves, to focus also on the ways we interpret our world. Marx was concerned about the alienating effects of waged labour under exploitative conditions, for the sake of a flourishing and recognizably human life.30 A key theme is that there is a dialectical interplay between humanity and nature, with the goal of bringing the material interchange between humanity and nature under rational control. Nevertheless, Marx’s analysis remains in the grip of the ‘modernist myth’ that human selfrealization depends fundamentally on the mastery of nature.31 What Marx fails to emphasize is the thought that a flourishing human life (and thus an end to alienation) cannot ultimately be disentangled from a flourishing world. In this respect, self and world are inextricably linked, and the overcoming of personal alienation demands not simply an overcoming of individualism but an overcoming of a domineering attitude towards ‘non-human nature’. Heidegger’s view of the self-world relation implies a modified conception of alienation. Heidegger is aware of the alienating power of concepts like ‘human resources’.32 But the danger of objectifying our world, or objectifying others, is not separate from that of subjectifying ourselves. Something more all-embracing than the idea of alienation as a failure to realize our own essence is needed to capture the implications of our ontological crisis as Heidegger conceives it. It is reasonable then to speak in this context of a world alienation, in which the subjectification of the self goes hand in hand with

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the objectification of nature. The delicate relations of meaning that constitute the self-world nexus become transformed in our understanding into a mere juxtaposition of a concatenation of objects and an inscrutable subject. Our existence is alienated in this sense when we not only interpret ourselves as a resource, but do so on the basis of a ‘theory of the real’ that constructs the self as a cipher at the heart of a nature that is real only to the extent that it is measurable and calculable in the representational system of modern mathematical physics. For example the most important projects of our lives, such as the project of starting and providing for a family, are presented as the outcome of brute causal mechanisms depending upon ‘selfish genes’, whose machinations are in principle explicable in purely physicalistic terms. Such accounts have no place for concepts of values, reasons or moral and political principles – upon which the intelligibility of our personhood is founded. Similarly, ‘rational’ human choice is represented by contemporary economic theory as a matter of self-interested subjects weighing up various potential costs and benefits and pursuing the route of maximum preference satisfaction – a model that has taken hold even within environmental economics.33 The various relations of meaning that structure our social life and inform our actions – including solidarity, altruism, compassion, honour, respect etc. – are reduced to the pursuit of individual self-interest; and self-interest in turn is reduced to the satisfaction of our strongest preferences, where the nature and strength of a preference is a brute physical given, not susceptible of further analysis or critical assessment. THE QUESTION (AND AN ATTEMPTED ANSWER) To what extent does the above analysis help us to understand the challenges that Rose identifies as confronting the modern environmental movement? Heidegger’s writings on technology and world alienation provide an in-depth diagnosis of the malaise associated with the ‘Age of the World Picture’. According to this analysis, our alienation does not simply consist in the instrumentalization (including self-instrumentalization) that was of interest to Marx.34 Over and above our tendency to treat ourselves and each other as resources and commodities we have developed a scientific and technological conception of nature and our place in it which leads us to understand ourselves and nature as a system of fungible and disposable resources, ripe for exploitation. The world alienation from which we suffer is not reducible to a way of understanding our world, but extends also to the way it is experienced. The ‘enframing’ that is characteristic of modern science and technology is not simply an ethical failing (e.g., in Kantian terms, a tendency to instrumentalize human and non-human subjects, rather than to respect them as ends).



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Rather, it is a way of ‘revealing’ – of experiencing, perceiving and making sense of the world.35 ‘Revealing’ here embraces perception as well as theoretical understanding, practical action as well as theoretical contemplation. Our environment and its human and non-human inhabitants are experienced and understood as resources, by way of a ‘theory of the real’ that is geared to regarding features of the world as real only to the extent that they lend themselves to technological manipulation. The all-embracing character of this alienation is evident in the fact that it appears to require no justification. The former world of (Aristotelian) subjects has been replaced by a world of ‘objects’, which are considered real only insofar as they are susceptible of measurement, prediction and control by the established methods of the physical sciences. Features of the world that do not lend themselves to such treatment are consigned to the domain of ‘subjectivity’ – the private and inscrutable realm of the self-conscious individual, whose values, motives and principles are nothing but the expressions of non-rational preferences – themselves perhaps ultimately explicable on the basis of genetics and neuroscience. The consequence is that everyday experience appears to confirm what techno-centric ideology preaches. The idea that we might be guilty of an ‘objectification’ of nature strikes us as absurd. How could ‘objectification’ be a concern when what we are surrounded by is precisely a world of ‘objects’? Our ontological crisis becomes an environmental crisis when we find that our ways of thinking, judging, communicating and campaigning are all underpinned by an objectified conception of ourselves and our environment. We may understand the natural systems on which human life depends in far more detail than our grandparents did. But if at the same time we understand those systems as a brute agglomeration of objects our understanding will be an alienating and alienated one. The planet we set out to protect will not be conceived as a world at all, but as a complex system of energy flows and matter in motion, detached from the realities of everyday experience. In such alienated conditions the prospects for principled collective action on behalf of the human and non-human victims of environmentally damaging activities look bleak. Collective principles are dismissed as a chance coming together of preferences, or at best of interests. Action on behalf of human and nonhuman nature is regarded as rational only to the extent that it concerns itself with the conservation of resources – of ‘standing-reserve’ – for what else is there to protect when that ‘else’ is conceived as nothing but ‘measurable accumulation’?36 Accordingly, the crisis that the environmental movement has encountered looks to have deeper roots than can be accounted for on the basis of a campaigning technique that has got out of hand. The problems that afflict contemporary public debate on environmental issues are not simply a matter of media strategy and the rhetoric of public debate. Rather, what we face is an

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ontological crisis with deep historical roots in modern scientific and technological culture. We remain mired in environmental inaction because our very theory of the real has served to make the earth unreal for us. How might such a crisis be resolved? Here the helpfulness of Heidegger’s analysis might appear to run out. The predominance of a particular mode of revealing the real is for Heidegger a matter of history and destiny – an epochal affair which conditions the character and achievements of an age but is absolutely not susceptible of instrumental manipulation by human actors. As Heidegger’s former student Hans-Georg Gadamer memorably put it ‘history does not belong to us; we belong to it’.37 If a particular mode of revealing the real is a historical affair we must apparently await a seismic historical shift before we can hope for its transformation into something more fruitful. Insofar as this view places the issue beyond the reach of simple instrumental manipulation it appears consistent with Heidegger’s broader thesis. The simplistic ambition to ‘get technology in hand’ will no doubt prove self-defeating if it represents nothing more than a further extension of technological rationality. But it would be an error to conclude that the only course is to wait passively for history to deliver an alternative. Heidegger notes that his analysis emerged from a meditation on the essence of technology. Such a meditation inevitably moves beyond the sphere of the technological, and this is itself an element in a historical process. More broadly, the historical attempt to understand the conditions that have led to our ontological crisis does not represent a step beyond history but is a distinct historical step in its own right. From the fact that history does not belong to us it does not follow that we can do nothing in the face of historical forces but wait passively for a historical shift to take place. Rather, it means that our own efforts are embedded in a broader historical process in which they inevitably have their own (major or minor) effects. Thus the effort to understand the origins of our world alienation is already part of a historical process that may in due course lead to a transformation – more or less dramatic – in the culture that gave rise to it. The view that we belong to history is not equivalent to a historical determinism.38 That the modern environmental movement is embedded in a historical process, which it cannot simply transcend, is not therefore an observation that should lead to a doctrine of despair and inertia. Rather, the proper moral to draw is that while there is no action we could take that would simply transcend the historical process, the core of the historical process is our own developing self-understanding. Our own efforts to understand our predicament are themselves evidence of an unfolding process that may already be on the brink of a decisive shift. Heidegger’s analysis is not therefore a counsel of despair, but a call to try to grasp the developments he discusses in their concrete historical dimension – a call to authentic self-understanding that seeks to evade the distortions of instrumentalistic thinking in both its voluntaristic and its deterministic dimensions.



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NOTES 1 Chris Rose, ‘Beyond the Struggle for Proof: Factors Changing the Environmental Movement’, Environmental Values 2, no. 4 (1993): 285–98; Robert Poole, ‘What Was Whole about the Whole Earth? Cold War and Scientific Revolution’, in The Surveillance Imperative: Geosciences during the Cold War and Beyond, ed. Simone Turchetti and Peder Roberts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 213–35; and Casey Rentmeester, Heidegger and the Environment (London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015). 2 Poole, ‘What Was Whole about the Whole Earth?’. 3 Martin Heidegger, ‘ “Only a God Can Save Us”: The Spiegel Interview (1966)’, trans. William J. Richardson, in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan (Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1981), 56. 4 In his new translation of the Bremen and Freiburg lectures, upon which Heidegger’s later writings on technology were based, Andrew Mitchell translates das Ge-Stell as ‘positionality’, die Gestelle as ‘framework’ and die Gestellung as ‘conscription’. Since my focus is on the later writings, and since William Lovitt’s translation of these writings is well established and familiar to English readers, I have elected to employ Lovitt’s usage in preference to that of Mitchell. These considerations aside, however, it seems to me that Mitchell provides very good reasons in support of his own preferred translation of these terms. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2012), p. xi. 5 Rose, ‘Beyond the Struggle for Proof’. 6 This process has, of course, issued in some important achievements – for example the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (1992) and the following United Nations Climate Change conferences (1995). 7 See Arne Naess and David Rothenberg, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 8 In the wider industrializing world the situation is worse, but here I will confine my attention to the developed world, as the course of the examples most pertinent to my central theme. See ‘Review of the Implementation of Agenda 21 and the Rio Principles’, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Division of Sustainable Development, accessed 16 January 2016, http://www.uncsd2012.org/ content/documents/194Synthesis%20Agenda%2021%20and%20Rio%20principles. pdf. 9 Rose, ‘Beyond the Struggle for Proof’, 292. 10 Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); and Erik M. Conway, Atmospheric Science at NASA: A History (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2008). 11 Heidegger, ‘Only a God Can Save Us’, 56. 12 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977), 3–35; Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, in The Question Concerning Technology, 115–54; and Heidegger, ‘Science and Reflection’, in The Question Concerning Technology, 155–82.

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13 See note 1 above. 14 Heidegger, ‘Science and Reflection’. 15 Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W. Elkington (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1993). 16 Heidegger, ‘Science and Reflection’. 17 Ibid., 172. 18 René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy with Selections from the Objections and Replies, trans. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 44–49. 19 Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences, trans. Henry Crew and Alfonso de Salvio (London: Macmillan, 1914). 20 Galileo Galilei, ‘The Assayer’, in The Essential Galileo, trans. Maurice A. Finocchiaro (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2008), 183. 21 Heidegger, ‘Science and Reflection’, 169. 22 Martin Heidegger, ‘Modern Science, Metaphysics and Mathematics’, in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 280. 23 Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, 50–62. 24 Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, 132. 25 For an account, see David J. Chalmers, ‘Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness’, Journal of Consciousness Studies 2, no. 3 (1995): 200–19. 26 Cf. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), §12–13. 27 Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in Basic Writings, 343–63. 28 Ibid. 29 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan (New York: Dover Publishing, 2012), 72–83. 30 See David McLellan, The Thought of Karl Marx: An Introduction (London: Macmillan, 1971); and Ernst Fischer, Marx in His Own Words, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Penguin, 1973). 31 William Leiss, The Domination of Nature (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 83. 32 Cf. Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, 18. 33 See David Pearce, Anil Markandya and Edward Barbier, Blueprint for a Green Economy (London: Earthscan Publications, 1989). 34 For an in-depth discussion, see Laurence P. Hemming, Heidegger and Marx: A Productive Dialogue over the Language of Humanism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013). 35 Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, 11–35. 36 Ibid., 17. 37 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Continuum, 2004), 278. 38 It would be possible to read a deterministic moral into much of Heidegger’s later ‘philosophy of Being’, as well as his Der Spiegel interview. In my view,



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however, this would be a mistake. Evidently Heidegger does not see the ‘solution’ to the malaise we have been discussing as a mere matter of will and self-assertion – a pragmatics affair of getting technology ‘in hand’ (and to that extent it may be a mistake to think in terms of a ‘solution’ at all). Short of determinism, it is perhaps tempting to regard Heidegger’s later philosophy as ‘quietistic’: we must patiently wait for another mode of revealing the real to be granted to us. But insofar as his concern is essentially with the history of Being, neither of these readings is forced upon us. Historicality does not entail determinism or ‘quietism’. History may not belong to us, but human beings still make history, albeit under definite historical conditions. To say that our existence is historical is to say that it is marked by the kind of freedom proper to history. We make history, but we do not make it ahistorically.

Chapter 4

Heidegger and Žižek On Political and Non-Political Action at the End of History1 Michael Lewis PRELUDE: BACK FROM SYRACUSE? Relations between philosophy and politics, it is said, have a tendency to turn out badly. Slavoj Žižek has provided an invigorating analysis of the suggestion that the attempt to derive a politics from an ontology can only result in totalitarianism.2 Beholden to unbending a priori principles, the politics that results will leave no room for democratic plurality, either within the body politic or between the political parties and political forms potentially competing for hegemony. The immortal derision of the question addressed to Heidegger in 1934 may be taken to encapsulate the continuity of a history which runs from the beginning of metaphysics in Plato to the end of its overcoming: ‘Back from Syracuse?’.3 In the twentieth century, philosophical politics or the politics of truth has resulted in both left-wing and right-wing totalitarianisms, the most important among them for the purposes of the encounter between Žižek and Heidegger being Stalinism and National Socialism. These are political positions which have been adopted – and in some cases formulated – on the basis of a theory of the totality of what-is, and the entirety of history as a single process, leading up to the practical issue of this particular politics with a fated inevitability. There can only be one party or political system which understands and responds to the truth of the age. All others simply need to be taught this, and competition among systems, politics itself in Ernesto Laclau’s sense, becomes superfluous. Hence, totalitarianism, in contrast to a democratic plurality of potentially hegemonic parties and interests.4 Philosophy as the grand narrative of metaphysics, the naming of beings as such and as a whole, has – it is said – always tended in this political direction, beginning with a novitiate’s faith in the existence of a politics that was 81

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adequate to its ontological theorizing, only to turn away from politics altogether in a feigned aristocratic indifference upon the inevitable disappointment of these hopes. In light of this tendency towards totalitarianism, the dominant view of the relation between theoretical philosophy and practical philosophy has been, for Žižek, the deconstructive one. This is the demand that political decisions and political acts only be theorized and theoretically guided up to a point, but at that point, a contingent empirical analysis of the particular situation must take over. The age of grand ideologies, singular struggles and unified political projects is thus avowed by a certain philosophy to be at an end. Thus the question of what kind of action it might be possible to undertake in such a world becomes all the more pressing. It is just this dichotomy of grand ‘ontological politics’ and pragmatic ‘merely ontic politics’ (Marxism and Hegelianism versus deconstruction, Žižek versus Laclau . . .) that Žižek attempts slowly and surely to overcome, as if with a dialectical sublation. To do this, he examines and re-evaluates Heidegger’s political engagement with National Socialism in the nineteenthirties. Heidegger’s Nazism seems at first glance the most conclusive demonstration of the totalitarian risk that philosophical politics runs. But Žižek demonstrates that with a certain twist, Heidegger’s engagement can be read as an indication of how one might in fact produce a politics of truth, a philosophical politics, driven by theory and yet avoiding totalitarianism, and certainly not democratic in the pejorative sense which Žižek habitually invokes, which is to say, liberal democracy, today’s consensus, understood as the ‘ideological supplement to capitalism’.5 Heidegger, after all, did not relinquish his ambition to find a politics adequate to his own age, which in the 1960s and 1970s was opening out into what might be deemed the global age. We have nevertheless been left with little more than fragments and hints scattered throughout Heidegger’s works as to what this politics might be. The question ‘what is to be done?’ may be said to have interested Heidegger, and yet this question, which asks after the action we might take in order to bring about change in a world which stands at the extreme point of nihilism, is perhaps prior to politics, since it does not in itself dictate the type of action we might be called upon to pursue: should it be politics, or might it not rather be ethical, or neither of the two? Žižek’s work is crucial in this regard since he has in a number of places presented his own work as an unorthodox form of Heideggerianism, and in particular as an unfolding of that moment in Heidegger’s career at which the action he felt himself compelled to carry out was unquestionably political. Thus Žižek’s work fastens upon an unfulfilled potential in Heidegger’s thought and on this basis develops a new form of politics, which, broadly speaking, takes the form of communism. It is difficult to imagine a bolder



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gesture than to take the politics of 1933 and to reconfigure it so as to move in quite the opposite political direction. And yet, as we shall see, it is precisely in the difference between Žižek’s relation to communism and Heidegger’s own, which is still perhaps underappreciated, that another possibility of action shall be revealed. At a moment in history in which nothing short of a global transformation seems capable of solving the problems facing mankind, animality, and indeed the whole of nature, the question of a grand politics, an encounter between mankind and ‘planetary’ technology, as Heidegger put it in 1935, of the kind which both Nazism and Communism were said to have staged, is one that should be raised again.6 If we live in an age in which the local has given way entirely to the global, because capitalism – or technology – has such an inherently international, systematic nature, then the time is still ripe to return to a thinker who attempted to think together the most modest, insignificant ‘things’, such as the water pitcher and the cross, and the most gigantic, homogenizing forces ever unleashed, that were raging over the entire surface of the planet. ŽIŽEK AND HEIDEGGER’S POLITICS Žižek, then, finds a different lesson in Heidegger’s sojourn with the tyrant, one which does not lead simply to an apolitical withdrawal, a passive awaiting, preparation, or even to some other non-political form of activity. In his text, ‘Why Heidegger Made the Right Step in 1933’, he attempts to retrieve a progressive kernel from Heidegger’s Nazi engagement, and above all a theory of the political act. Žižek’s original article forms part of a series of attempts to valorize the most problematic Heidegger of all: wilful, decisionistic, hubristic, engaged in an explicit politicization of ontology, and thus an ontologization of politics. In the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), Heidegger believed that he had found a political party which could bring about a new order of being, a new epoch in being’s history, or at least an organization which was sufficiently attuned to the present epoch that it could make such a future possible. For Žižek, Heidegger’s Nazism casts the whole of Heidegger’s oeuvre in a different light, in the momentary flaring up of a (wilful and free) subject peeping momentarily through the surface, in a discourse which otherwise tries to snuff it out. And since this subject is precisely what Žižek wishes to retrieve as a crucial element of his own theory of the political act, this allows him to revalorize precisely that moment of Heidegger’s discourse which has for the most part been most vehemently rejected.7

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What is problematic for Žižek is the notion that politics can directly bring about ontological change. Žižek himself is in search of a politics which can open up the space for the event without directly willing it. Heidegger was ‘almost right’ in his ‘decisionist’ attempt wilfully to change the course of history, to bring being out of its abeyance through a political gesture, for he thereby came close to discovering the structure of the revolutionary act.8 As Žižek has it elsewhere, in a passage which contains the origin of the title of the text presently under consideration, ‘what [the Habermasian] criticism rejects as proto-Fascist decisionism is simply the basic condition of the political. In a perverted way, Heidegger’s Nazi engagement was therefore a ‘step in the right direction’, a step towards openly admitting and fully assuming the consequences of the lack of ontological guarantee, of the abyss of human freedom’.9 In other words, Žižek wishes to modify Heidegger’s political gesture in such a way as to re-emphasize the abyss that separates the two orders of being and freedom (in the language of German Idealism) or structure and subject (in terms more reminiscent of Jacques Lacan, the other major inspiration behind Žižek’s discourse). The novelty and audacity of such a hermeneutic gesture on Žižek’s part by itself gives us cause to investigate its merits, and if we diverge from Žižek’s ultimate conclusion in certain ways, this diversion was made possible by the very path it began by following. Even apart from its inherent interest, Žižek’s thesis allows us to reveal another possible reading of Heidegger’s relation to politics and hence a potentially new answer to the still pressing question of ‘what is to be done?’ In this essay, we shall simply try to explain what Žižek’s theory of the act is, and then expose how Žižek reads Heidegger’s ontological difference in such a way that would allow us to locate Žižek’s theory of the political act in Heidegger himself, however not in the middle Heidegger but in the later, where its role and nature, particularly in relation to Heidegger’s developing understanding of the human being, will allow us to put some questions to Žižek in return. Above all, we shall propose that in the later Heidegger, it is not clear that the action at issue is any longer political at all. Thus we shall come to ask whether Žižek is entitled to find such a distinct echo of his theory of action in Heidegger’s work, or whether he must in the end depart from him. We shall also interrogate Heidegger’s own relation to communism, which in this context Žižek largely underestimates. This seems to us important in the context of the ‘end of history’ and the planetary reach of the system of Gestell which might go by the title of ‘globalization’. Today, history in the form of the destining of being, for Heidegger, can no longer unfurl itself as it has done up to now; and we are faced with the problem of what if any human action is to be pursued. Mere inactivity was appropriate only to an epoch in which destiny was still alive,



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and yet the active precipitation of a new epoch seems similarly to belong to the past – as Heidegger says, it is not clear that the era of Ereignis which follows or perhaps even coincides with that of Gestell may be understood as a distinct or subsequent era. Clearly a great deal of the present work will at least implicitly involve the question of translation, linguistic and geometric, since our text might be said to constitute an experiment in removing Heidegger’s terms from their own idiom and transporting them to a context which Heidegger did not perhaps anticipate, a translation which is also a move from right to left. Perhaps this move beyond a strictly orthodox Heideggerianism is a necessary condition for deploying his thought in the ‘global age’, and particularly if this means to think from a different political perspective to Heidegger’s own, as it frequently seems to. What in the end are we to say of a philosophical discourse if it can be translated into both an extreme right-wing and an extreme leftwing project, and particularly – in Žižek’s case, at the very moment when Heidegger stood as far as possible from the Left? ŽIŽEK’S THEORY OF THE ACT For Žižek, a political act may be understood in terms of structure and event. A genuine act, worthy of the name, is the preparation of an event or the advent of the New: this means the installation of a new structure, which here refers to the system in which the act takes place, and this in many cases means the social order. The political act is not supported by any actually existing structure, but rather makes it possible to do away with the old order and institute a new one. Such a gesture is frequently described as a ‘revolution’, which is opposed to a gradual change or ‘evolution’ that would be either regressive or progressive. The act effects such a radical change by seeking out a particular element of the structure which embodies in a concealed way the universal truth of the structure, just as the proletarian in the Marxist vision of a capitalist society ‘in itself’ represents that order’s repressed truth, or the interests of the whole of mankind, and not just one single class. Žižek, influenced by Louis Althusser and Lacanian psychoanalysis, calls this element the ‘symptom’ or the ‘symptomal point’ of the structure. The revolutionary political act first attempts to unmask this symptomal aberration not as an exception to the system but as the very truth of the system. Since this element is incompatible with the system as a whole, bringing it out of concealment reveals the contradiction inherent to the system and therefore its instability and finitude: its susceptibility to change. The political act is thus first of all an act of revelation which, precisely by uncovering,

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destroys the ideological impression of permanence and necessity which the structure exudes. The name for this gesture in the Marxist tradition is ‘ideology-critique’. The political act is first of all a critique of ideology. By performing this critique, the act opens up the possibility of a radical transformation of the structure, for it would reveal what the present system is forced to exclude – or rather eclipse – as well as the fact that the structure’s very existence depends upon this exclusion. This radical transformation would be an ‘event’ in the strict sense: the arrival of a new structure which either depends upon a new contradiction or which – ideally – involves no contradiction at all and no occlusion. Perhaps it is only the latter that would constitute a future of a genuine kind, but to differing degrees either would be new and their advent would constitute an ‘event’. At least as a first approximation, and as a way into a more subtle understanding, we may understand the social system whose fragility is in question as the structuralists Ferdinand de Saussure and Claude Lévi-Strauss did. For structuralism, any system worthy of the name may be understood to be analogous to a collection of signifiers. This explains why Jacques Lacan, one of Žižek’s great inspirations, could call the system afflicted with a symptomatic trait a ‘symbolic order’. If structuralism may be understood to focus exclusively on the functioning of the symbolic, we must, with Lacan, move beyond structuralism ever so slightly and describe the symbolic order’s symptomal moment as ‘the real’. Žižek also refers to it as a ‘trauma’, which, to speak more precisely, is rather the real origin of the symptom, that moment of the real which has made an impact upon the symbolic, or which struck the host of the symbolic order before it possessed a set of symbols capable of integrating this ‘outsider’. Thus the real disrupts the functioning of the symbolic and ruffles its otherwise smooth surface. The real is an element which the symbolic has been unable fully to integrate. To be more precise, in the present case we are speaking of a real whose repression is fundamental to the existence of the entire symbolic order because it was repressed at the very inauguration of that particular order: the real was thus ‘foreclosed’ rather than merely ‘repressed’, to deploy a distinction which Lacan invokes in his early Seminars to translate and rework Freud’s distinction between Verwerfung and Verdrängung.10 Repression or foreclosure is, however, inevitably incomplete: this is proved empirically by the very existence of symptoms – neurosis, and psychosis, and it is upon this incompleteness that psychoanalysis itself is premised. As a disease develops, the real comes ever more insistently to intrude upon the symbolic, in the form of the symptom. The symptom is the manifestation of the real within the symbolic, or its manifestation tout court. It is the ‘return of the repressed’, the only form of appearance which the real can assume in an order which excludes it by its very nature. The real thus appears as a distortion or malfunction of the symbolic machine, a lack, deficiency or negation within it.



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The distinction between two kinds of exclusion is reflected in two distinct kinds of return, a return from under repression, which leads to neurosis, with its tics and obsessive rituals, and a return from foreclosure, which results in psychotic delusion or a ‘loss of reality’. A reorganization of the current symbolic order would be a response to a neurosis, while a genuinely revolutionary act would respond to social psychosis. In any case, these returns in the form of symptoms are signs which hint at something beyond the symbolic, bringing to light a possibility which has not been included in the symbolic order itself, and indeed which that particular symbolic order has been constructed precisely in order to evade: it is a possibility which therefore indicates that the symbolic order is incomplete or ‘not-all’ (pas tout) as Lacan has it in his later work.11 The incongruous real becomes glaring, impossible any longer to ignore, in the return of the repressed, which is the symptom, a certain social disorder or malaise. And while a conservative will respond to this by redoubling the repression in the name of a maintenance of the Same and a societal identity which is supposedly historically stable, a progressive leftist will address this irruption by calling for a political act – or an escalation of the act which was already begun with the revelation of critique – an act which will reorganize or indeed radically renew the symbolic order which has been shown to be stifling or repressive.12 A politics which acts in such a way is not ontological but ontic, in touch with its ontic situation, and it would open up genuinely new possibilities from within that situation. Thus it would neither be a passive awaiting of the new, nor a violent attempt simply to bring it about. Thus Žižek’s politics is neither simply the ontic compromise of deconstruction, nor the straightforwardly ontological politics of Heidegger’s middle period, which attempts by brute force to precipitate an ontological event. This other form of politics is one which relates to beings in their current configuration (it is ontic) but in a way that indicates their incompleteness, their inconsistency and self-contradiction (their symptomatic moment) and thus opens up a site within them at which a new ontological event could occur. In Žižekian terms this would involve a radical reorganization of the symbolic order understood as the very structure of the social, which could extend so far as to encompass the entire globe, perhaps in the form of a new master signifier’s assuming the hegemonic position. In any case, ontic action cannot bring about a new ontological event, but it can make it possible, by means of the initial revelation. This initial revelation is a necessary condition for any transformative act. Thus, the political act has preconditions, or at least it moves in a necessary series of stages. Practice is made possible by theory, a theoretical effort which brings to light the inconsistency of the current regime and thus destroys its appearance of being natural and eternal. The apparently natural is revealed to be historical. The revelatory analysis of the symptom opens the symbolic

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order to the fact that it is premised upon an act of foundation which it had previously disavowed. It can no longer deny the fact that it is finite and thereby impermanent and so vulnerable to future overcoming. The present is opened to the fact that it has a past, and this in turn makes it possible to have a future. Thus we move from theory to practice, from the critique of ideology to its practical counterpart, which is not a necessary consequence and hence must be considered a distinct entity: this latter moment is the revolution itself (or in milder cases, the evolution).13 Perhaps it is not just a recent trope of Žižek’s writing to suggest that what is needed today is not (first of all) action, but rather thought. In this, perhaps, we can see the first signs of Žižek’s proximity to Heidegger, although Heidegger himself would rather have said that thinking in the form of revelation is itself a transformative action. A TRANSLATION OF ŽIŽEK’S THEORY OF THE ACT INTO HEIDEGGERIAN TERMS Thus we may initiate the act of translation or transposition which we alluded to at the start and begin our turn towards Heidegger, whose discourse on politics and indeed on philosophy may at first glance seem to be as far removed as possible from this structuralist, psychoanalytic, Marxist language that we have so far followed Žižek in deploying. Now we have a passage which might run between them, however narrow, and so we may begin to move towards an exploration of the potentially vast space which it opens onto. In fact, it is possible to translate Žižek’s theory of the act into a vocabulary which is recognizably Heideggerian, and indeed Žižek himself does just this. Žižek describes trauma as occurring when ‘an ontic intrusion gets so excessively powerful that it shatters the very ontological horizon’.14 Here we should read the ontic intrusion as the return of the repressed, and the ontological horizon as the symbolic order, the concepts and words through which we think and speak – the transcendental conditions for the possibility of thought and speech, or ‘being’ in the early Heideggerian sense of a ‘transcendens’ or ‘transcendental’.15 Žižek has elsewhere spoken of this ‘short-circuit’ between being and beings, which on an orthodox understanding of the early Heideggerian text should not occur.16 It is perhaps something which psychoanalytic theory and above all clinical data introduces to philosophy as such, as if this were a supplement issuing from a kind of (clinical) empiricism which philosophy as such cannot countenance. For Žižek, the political act would be one which spanned the divide between being and beings, the ontological and the ontic: it would reveal the ontological truth within an ontic moment, and the ontological frame would then itself



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be overwhelmed by the epiphany which issues from that ontic element. This would mean that an entity can have effects within beings as a whole in such a way as to make a new epoch possible, a new event of being. This would amount to the institution of a (symbolic) structure so new that it allowed beings as a whole to appear in a radically different way and introduced another set of possibilities for human existence. The imposition of a new order following the traumatic eruption is explicitly identified by Žižek as a new event of being, a new ‘ontological disclosure’: he speaks in his own philosophical dialect – which at certain moments assumes the form of a curious mixture of Lacan (or rather, Badiou) and Heidegger – of ‘the violent synthetic imposition of a (New) Order – the Event of [the] Historical Disclosure of Being’.17 But what is revealed by this Heideggerian inflection which seems to weave in and out of Žižek’s text, particularly in the period following The Ticklish Subject (1999) and its extensive engagement with Heidegger’s politics, which seems from then on to mark Žižek’s text with a recurrent Heideggerian tic? Let us begin to answer this question by reading the following description of the act: ‘The true courage of an act is always the courage to accept the inexistence of the big Other, i.e. to attack the existing order at the point of its symptomal knot’.18 We can understand this obscure passage by reference to the previous Heideggerian translation: the ‘inexistence of the big Other’ is the incompleteness of the symbolic order, which amounts to entire ontological structure’s vulnerability to being undermined by a single ontic element, a rent in the horizon of the world, akin to a single entity which comes to outshine all of the others, as if a mountain assumed such a stature that it punctured the sky and let in another light. This ‘inexistence’ therefore describes the finitude of the current disclosure of being. But we should tarry awhile with this notion of the inexistence or incompleteness of the ‘non-all’, since, despite being incompatible with the early Heidegger’s conceptual scheme, it in fact forms part of what is perhaps most illuminating in Žižek’s reading of Heidegger. It points towards an extremely novel interpretation of the ontological difference, which promises much for a progressive contemporary use of Heideggerian thought, and which reads ‘being’ (Sein) as the immanent limit of beings as a whole, a limit which renders this ontic totality ‘in-existent’ or incomplete. AN IMMANENT INTERPRETATION OF THE ONTOLOGICAL DIFFERENCE Žižek himself, in a later text, entitled The Parallax View, explicitly identifies the ontological difference with the difference between the symbolic and

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the real, understood in the way of the later Lacan, for whom the real is not a transcendent entity standing in strict opposition to the symbolic, but rather an internal limit of the kind we have just invoked. And Žižek here affirms that the ontological difference is not the difference between beings and something which transcends them, but the relation between beings as a whole and their own incompleteness.19 Thus Žižek presents us with an immanentist reading of the ontological difference, which I have argued elsewhere is approached by Heidegger himself in his later work.20 One of the most valuable aspects of Žižek’s approach is that he gives us one way to make sense of Heidegger’s gesture. This is how Žižek invokes Heidegger’s authority for this reading and locates this reading in Heidegger himself, albeit ambiguously and tentatively: ‘Ontological difference is not between the Whole of beings and their Outside, as if there were a Super-Ground of the All. [. . .] Being is the horizon of finitude which prevents us from conceiving beings in their All. Being [. . .] is always also that which makes the domain of beings itself “non-all” ’.21 The real is the non-totality of appearance itself, the fact that the phenomenal entity cannot be ‘viewed from nowhere’, but can only be seen perspectivally: the real is nothing besides the necessity of perspective, the need for appearance as such.22 On Žižek’s account, this ‘real’ is identical with Heidegger’s ‘being’. We should now demonstrate how Žižek’s Lacanian language is not at all implausible as an actual translation of Heidegger’s notions. Being is the nothing: it is something other than an entity, which makes its presence known within beings. This nothingness limits the infinity and totality of entities and it does so precisely by being something other than an entity, or more precisely by being marked by a trait which the other entities do not share. As we shall see, this trait is historically specific, for this differentiating trait must stand in contrast to the trait which predominates among beings as a whole at a particular moment in history; in Heidegger’s age, this common trait was eternity – or permanent presence – in the form of an eternal return of the same which is made possible by the replication and continuous regeneration carried out by technology. Thus the singular thing which stands in contrast to the preponderance of entities will be characterized by fragility and finitude – uniqueness. Such a thing will be forever slipping away into a void, or it will already have done so, but not without leaving a trace. The presence of this void prevents beings from forming a totality in the sense of a uniform coherent group. For Heidegger himself, then, being might be said to be an immanent limit within beings as a whole, which renders the totality finite and thus comprehensible in a certain determinate way to a finite mind, or, more precisely, apparent to a finite existence. Now, at certain times, in certain parts of his oeuvre, Žižek attributes this particular understanding of being, as immanent void rather than



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transcendent plenum, to Heidegger himself. For instance, in the following passages: ‘with regard to the ‘draft’ of the withdrawal of Being which attracts us by its withdrawal [a reference to What is Called Thinking?] [. . .]. In Lacanian terms, this ‘draft’ of the withdrawal is the gap in the big Other [the symbolic]’,23 along with the passages we have already cited from The Parallax View. However, in the essay we are focusing on here, Žižek refuses to grant Heidegger this interpretation.24 Why is it strategically important for him to do so here? It seems that this refusal on Žižek’s part is made partly in order to allow him to distinguish his own political position from Heidegger’s.25 For Žižek, because Heidegger does not – here – recognize being as immanent to beings, he is unable to share Žižek’s theory of the act. Žižek’s own theory of the act advocates only the creation of a site for the event; perhaps the absence of such a theory forced Heidegger’s gesture to become hyperbolic and compelled him to imagine that it was possible for a human individual or a political party wilfully to cause such an event. ON A POTENTIALLY PREPARATORY ACTION IN THE LATER HEIDEGGER But here, we should like to begin putting some questions to Žižek’s hermeneutic strategy and as a result to his conclusions. It seems to us quite possible that Heidegger’s later work, after the 1930s, contains a theory of action very closely akin to Žižek’s. Let us begin to examine the very question of ‘action’ in Heidegger’s work. In texts such as the ‘Letter on Humanism’, Heidegger attempts to answer the question of what a true kind of action would be, an act which would make a genuine difference. To make a difference in the most radical sense is to open up a distinction between beings and being, the collapse of which constituted the very origin of Western history, a collapse (or withdrawal) which has been progressively concealed and forgotten. Heidegger refers to this process as Seinsvergessenheit. An action that would not be a wholly ontic matter of simply rearranging entities would be one which induces or prolongs an ontological event, an alteration to the way in which beings as a whole are manifested. The question is, what kind of action did Heidegger understand this to be? These actions that we as humans are called upon to undertake are not precipitation and revolution, but rather a preparation and fostering, and we apply these actions to those singular beings which Heidegger calls ‘things’ (Dinge). The thing is a singular entity not entirely – or no longer – subsumed by the mass functionality and commodification of contemporary life. It is an entity

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which is not entirely exhausted by its readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit) or by its presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit). The thing is a moment of fragility in the current order, an order which, in the technological era, has elided its own conditions of manifestation and thus its own historicality. We have already discussed this in terms of the ‘void’. This elision of the void is the forgetting of being, the obliviation of the event, its concealment beneath fully and eternally present substantial beings. The finitude of the thing is closed out by technology in favour of constant presence. This is the continuously available potential which Heidegger names ‘Bestand’ (resource or ‘standing-reserve’), and which amounts to a realization in practical form of the Western metaphysical understanding of being as ousia or stable substantial presence. The thing in its singularity is infinitely vulnerable to the replication of its singularity – described in Marxist discourse as ‘commodification’ – at the hands of Gestell or the ‘template’.26 The template or perhaps more precisely the ‘system’ (syn-stema) in which it participates, insists upon making this unrepeatable singularity repeatable. Technology can resurrect the dead, and it seems to claim to bestow eternal life. It promises the death of death or the end of finitude. This constitutes the absolute uniqueness of our contemporary age, its singular danger. Thus the thing is always threatened with its own destruction, teetering as it does on the edge of the void. This fragile destructibility of the thing is precisely the principal form of its presence, and it reveals the peculiar historical character of the present world as destructive of singularity. The thing is precisely the ‘symptomal point’ of the current configuration. The thing is the symptom of being. Thus it is the promise, and it gives us the hope of a new world. Being for Heidegger is nothing besides the singularity of the dying, finite thing, which is to say that being is immanent to beings as a whole, as the void of their finitude, the elided event or verb which underlies and renders possible the substance named by the noun. To take action in the way of sparing, protecting or at least a bringing to light of the destruction of singular things, amounts to the most proper action humans can take in order to resist being’s absolute oblivion. This is an action which introduces a distinction within the immanence of beings as a whole, between the overwhelming mass of replaceable technologized entities and the singular thing, and this distinction is the immanent form of the ontological difference between beings and being. FROM MAN TO THE THING What is perhaps most important for us here is the place of being, and in particular the contrast between the place of being and finitude in the early



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Heidegger and the later. In the early Heidegger it most fundamentally situated in man, and in the later Heidegger it belongs first of all to the thing.27 In the early Heidegger, it is man who spans the ontological difference by means of the transcendence of his understanding of being (Seinsverständnis), which extends between himself as an empirical entity and being as the transcendental intelligibility of the world, this stretch constituting man’s ‘existence’ (ek-histemi, ex-sistere). The stretching draws the fabric of beings into such a state of tension that a tearing takes place – Heidegger uses the verb ‘entrissen’ – and illumination occurs and it does so explicitly, manifestation itself becomes manifest. In the later Heidegger this rent occurs not in man but in the thing. The thing is the one remaining trace of the ontological difference, the slightest memory of the fact that there is such a thing as ‘being’. It is a memorial stone to its forgetting (a ‘trace of the trace’).28 But despite this shift in the place of being from man to the thing, human beings still play a unique role. They remain uniquely sensitive to the forgotten, the absent, and the endangered due to their understanding of death. It is because man has an especial relation to his own death that he alone is sensitive to the singularity of things, and this is what allows him to be the guardian of such sites, to watch over the places where being might erupt. This is why his designation when it comes to being is the ‘mortal’ (Sterblich). Death is ‘the shrine of the nothing’ and therefore the ‘shelter [Gebirg] of being’.29 Man is the placeholder or ‘lieu-tenant’ of being: ‘Being, however, for its opening, needs man as the there of its manifestation. [/] [. . .] The human is the placeholder [Platzhalter] of the nothing’ (Four Seminars, 63/108) (cf. On Belief, 108–9). As if to prove that Heidegger’s notion of action is intended precisely to bring to light these void moments within the whole, we need only recall the Heideggerian attitude of letting-be, Seinlassen and Gelassenheit – the task of the lieutenant. The thing is an entity which stands in contrast to the rest of its world, and thus presents the possibility of an alternative world. This is the reason for the rustic nature of so many of Heidegger’s examples. They are chosen to contrast with the urban technological world of which they are now a (largely defunct) part. To let a thing be means to refuse to let it be taken up into the realm of resource, energy generation, and production that is threatening to engulf the globe. They are to be allowed to crumble and die in their own time, and thus to remain singularities, instances of irreplaceability. When things die they leave a void behind. They leave a gap precisely because they cannot be replaced. Since being itself is singularity, and the thing was thus the embodiment of being within beings as a whole, the death of the thing leaves a clearing in the world in which being has the possibility of sending itself

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again, in a new form. If all forms of void, negativity and death are closed out by technology, there will be no such possibility left. This is why Gelassenheit must mean something like letting-die, allowing something to pass away and thus to be singular, leaving in their wake an absence which cannot be sutured. The thing must replace the human being as the site of being if we are to conform with the immanentist transformation in the later Heidegger’s thought: it does without the remnant of transcendence that was involved in the existence of man. Thus, it seems to us that Heidegger’s enigmatic notion of the thing can be greatly clarified by reference to Žižek’s theory. The clearing left by the destruction or the destructibility of the thing makes apparent the fact that the uniform appearance of every other being in the system was made possible only by the suppression of singularity and thus of the immanent difference between a singular being and the multiplicity of common objects that surround it. Having recalled the proximity between Heidegger and Žižek here, we might propose that the latter is perhaps mistaken in those instances where he suggests that Heidegger does not understand being as a void immanent to the totality of entities. Žižek would be right to say so only if he were referring to Heidegger’s early and middle period, where his understanding of being was indeed more Platonic, closer to the transcendence of the ideal (the ontōs on) over the real (the mē on). For Žižek, politics must direct its action at the symptomal point of the whole, the phenomenalized absence in which the occluded truth of the system reveals itself under interpretation or the pressure of critique. And Heidegger is supposed to be unable to see this. But this symptomal place of the void in the current order is precisely the place of the thing, which is the very ‘topic’ of Heidegger’s later work, which he described as the ‘topology of being’ in a sense more strictly Lacanian than is often suspected.30 Topology is the study of entities for which only the nodes are important and the rest of the structure can bend and move, as in Lacan’s famous knots.31 At the same time, this discourse on the thing and its relation to being and man will allow us to introduce our own reading of Heidegger’s political act: it attempted a gesture largely on the basis of his early work which would have been possible and legitimate only on the basis of the later work. Thus, Žižek’s criticism of Heidegger’s understanding of being at this particular point would be valid only for the early Heidegger, and yet his reading of the ontological difference is applicable only to the late Heidegger. And in the particular essay we are largely confining ourselves to here Žižek fails to respect this distinction. But this is not a pedantic matter of Heideggerian scholarship and chronology, nor is it an instance of the often rather petty criticism directed at Žižek’s



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sometimes careless reading – after all, Žižek’s philologically inexact readings of philosophers tend to reveal far more than the patient work of diligent scholars, and hence their philosophical value remains much higher. This chronological point assumes its full significance when we bring it into conjunction with the changing place of the human in Heidegger’s later work. We have seen that man’s role in the later work is not to tear open a new clearing of being, heroically, by his own will and in the site of his own understanding. It is to recognize being scattered in the unkempt and unnoticed corners of the world, it is gently to tend the thing as the repository of potential illumination. This is ultimately the reason for describing man as the ‘shepherd of being’ rather than its ‘lord’.32 Man fosters and nurtures (hegen) the thing in order to keep open the possibility that new epochs of history may one day arrive.33 But what is not at all clear is that – after the 1930s – this action is intended to be a collective action. It is not clear that it is political.34 IS HEIDEGGER’S ACTION POLITICAL? Standing guard over the thing is, for Heidegger, the task of thinking, which in his early work and indeed to the very end, he describes as ‘phenomenology’, even if it is raised to the hyperbolic and paradoxical level of a ‘phenomenology of the inapparent’.35 But as the ‘Letter on Humanism’ avers, this is a thinking which is not without effect; it is a kind of action, and yet an action which should be equated not with politics but with ‘ethics’ (Ethik), albeit in a new and more fundamental sense of the word ēthos.36 This would mark a clear distinction between Heidegger and Žižek, for it is clear that Žižek sees no other option but that the ontological act is political, or at least that such an act could be. And this has repercussions for Žižek’s own theory: it seems to us that the model of political action which Žižek ends up with by beginning from Heidegger’s middle period (which is to say ultimately the early work rather than the fully developed later position) commits him a certain humanism: man will be assigned too central a position, just as he was in the early Heidegger. The symptomatic point of the whole will be for Žižek, as it was for Marx, the exploitation of man, in the form of the proletariat. It is as if the point which reveals the truth of the whole and thus makes possible its revolutionary destruction will be something human. Heidegger’s later thought seems to teach us that the symptomatic point of the whole is more likely to be the exploitation of nature than the exploitation of man – not least because nature is more finite than technological man, as is becoming apparent in today’s

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environmental crisis and the increasingly technological – and hence reproducible – character of the human.37 In Heidegger’s later work on the thing, the human has a marginal place in the manifestation of being, being the guardian of a site extraneous to him rather than being himself this site. This implies that the wilful, subjective, human act which he might well have advocated in the nineteen-thirties can no longer be supported in the later work. We have indeed suggested that Žižek’s own theory of the act is almost identical to this notion of preparing a site for the event, but this has in the end served only to bring out the difference between Žižek and Heidegger all the more starkly: for Žižek this act is political and somehow originates in human will, and for Heidegger, it is not. A question should then be posed to Žižek as to whether his own theory is in general sufficiently different from Heidegger’s for him to be entitled to make coherent in another non-Heideggerian way this short-circuit between middle and later Heideggerian positions, and if it is substantially different, in what precise ways.38 Or is Žižek simply an orthodox Heideggerian, who takes Heidegger’s thought to a certain logical conclusion that he himself was prevented from attaining. For, despite all we have said, is it so clear that there is no politics in Heidegger’s work? We should recall Heidegger’s statement, made in old age – and indeed posthumously – in his interview with Der Spiegel, according to which ‘a decisive question for me today is: how can a political system accommodate itself to the technological age, and which political system would this be?’39 Heidegger continues: ‘I have no answer to this question. I am not convinced it is democracy’.40 On this point Žižek is in complete agreement, and yet Žižek’s solution is broadly speaking communism, and Žižek consistently states that Heidegger had no time for communism.41 But in fact Heidegger was a great deal more sympathetic to communism than Žižek seems to imagine. A brief concluding examination of his thoughts on communism might lead us to suggest that the idea of translating the later Heidegger’s works into a left-wing discourse might not be so far-fetched, and not least because Heidegger himself made some – small – steps in this direction himself. HEIDEGGER ON COMMUNISM After his Nazi engagement, particularly in the gigantic and tortured works of the 1930s, but also later on, Heidegger’s relation to communism was anything but simple. Indeed, there are many passages where Heidegger refers to communism with a more positive turn of phrase than he bestows upon capitalism. Something deeply symptomatic of the age speaks from out of communism.



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In the ‘Letter on Humanism’, Heidegger reaffirms the idea that communism embodies an ‘elemental experience’ of the contemporary epoch: No matter which of the various positions one chooses to adopt toward the doctrines of communism and to their foundation, from the point of view of the history of being it is certain that an elemental experience of what is world-historical speaks out in it. Whoever takes ‘communism’ only as a ‘party’ or a ‘Weltanschauung’ is thinking too shallowly, just as those who by the term ‘Americanism’ mean, and mean derogatorily, nothing more than a particular lifestyle.42

This even-handed reference to capitalism at the end displays the Heidegger we are more accustomed to reading about, the one who asserts that ‘Europe lies in the pincers between Russia and America, which are metaphysically the same’.43 And yet there is another Heidegger, more interesting for our purposes, who is not so egalitarian in his treatment of communism and capitalism. ‘Russian’ communism seems to have the advantage over ‘American’ capitalism. In a text on The History of Beyng (‘Sein’ spelt in the old Germanic way, ‘Seyn’), Heidegger insists that to do justice to communism one must ensure that it is thought neither ‘politically’ nor ‘sociologically’, neither in terms of ‘worldview’ [weltanschaulich] nor ‘anthropologically’, indeed not even merely ‘metaphysically’, but is conceived rather as that ordering [Fügung] of beings as such and as a whole that marks the historical era as that of the consummation, and thereby of the end, of all metaphysics.44

The order given to the ways of thinking to be rejected is extremely characteristic of Heidegger from the very beginning: political science and sociology are the first to be dismissed, followed by the idea of a world view, and then the always acute danger of anthropology, before we finally reach the idea that communism might embody a metaphysics and indeed metaphysics’ very end. Communism is something like a symptom of the present historical epoch insofar as, for Heidegger, in this regard, the most significant feature of communism is that it relies on a revelation of nature in the form of power and energy: ‘Power [Macht] is [. . .] the name for the being of beings’.45 Heidegger’s fascinating analysis of power and communism in The History of Beyng expresses the twofold nature of his stance towards communism and capitalism: on the one hand he stresses the essential sameness of these apparently opposed state forms, and on the other he privileges communism as a more self-aware – or at least more revelatory – form of politics. All state forms today would be alike in considering political affairs in terms of power. The difference between these forms is merely one of awareness: one does not see that one is dominated by power in democratic regimes –

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or perhaps in non-totalitarian stages of communism – whereas this power relation becomes quite blatantly apparent in a dictatorship.46 Nevertheless, Heidegger suggests that the invisibility of power’s exercise is a condition of its utmost effectivity. He suggests that power becomes unconditional not in its uninhibited exercise by a dictator, but when communism distributes it among the entire populace, where its ubiquity renders it tacit and invisible. In his lectures on Parmenides, Heidegger characterizes communism as essentially a combination of total power and technology – the total power of the party and the most extreme form of technological deployment: ‘the word of Lenin: Bolshevism is Soviet power + electrification. That means Bolshevism is the “organic”, i.e., organized, calculating (and as +) conclusion of the unconditional power of the party along with complete technologization’.47 Communism takes the technological gesture to its outer extreme, a limit at which it might become visible as related to being. Technology, as we know from ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, worked out for the Bremen Lectures of 1949 and so from broadly the same period as the Parmenides lectures (1942–1943), presupposes the revelation of nature as potential energy: in a word, ‘power’, the power to drive the very machines which extract this energy.48 Capitalism may also do this, but it seems that it does not do so as explicitly as communism, it does not remark the fact that a revelation of a particular kind is taking place here. In the end, there seem to be two ways in which Heidegger reads communism as rendering this revelation explicit: the first is by taking the form of totalitarianism and manifesting openly the total reach of its power; the second does not refer to the totalitarian form which actually existing communism assumed and instead consists in the fact that communism distributes its power among all, whereby it becomes unconditional, since the very ubiquity of power conceals it from view. And because this power is distributed only among human beings, and is still utterly dependent upon the revelation of nature as a resource to be exploited, it renders the contemporary form of being quite apparent. But one might also interpret this in another way, by suggesting that by distributing power equally, power itself sinks into inapparence. Perhaps this is why Heidegger must refer to the way in which power was in fact concentrated in the hands of the party, the few as opposed to the many: for it is only through disparity and opposition that manifestation takes place, and thus perhaps it was only when this totalitarian concentration became apparent that communism could assume the absolutely revelatory role which Heidegger assigns it.



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In any case, from the late 1930s to the early 1940s, we can say that for Heidegger, communism is more symptomatic of its age than capitalism. Therefore, despite Žižek’s critique of Heidegger that he does not recognize the communist revolution as an event, we should ask whether Heidegger not doing just that when he states that communism brings to the fore the truth of its age, which is the revelation of nature as energy and power. CONCLUSION: TO OPPOSE DEMOCRACY AND CAPITALISM WITHOUT COMMUNISM? And yet, if communism itself adopts an exploitative attitude to nature just as much as Nazism and capitalism, and if nature in its finitude is indeed the symptomatic point of our age, then the most communism can achieve is to be the revelatory moment of an ideology-critique, which would perhaps be to say that it can only be treated as a symptom and never as a position to be adopted. That would mean that Heidegger himself could not be a communist. Thus Heidegger closes down more options than Žižek. He refuses both of capitalism and communism on the grounds of their humanism and exploitative relation to nature, and he is thereby denied Žižek’s route out of democracy – in the direction of communism. For him there is no crushed or betrayed revolutionary potential just waiting to be redeemed, producing the New as the repetition of the past – a virtual ‘idea of communism’ – in a different and this time successful actualization. Heidegger’s task is yet more challenging: to oppose democracy without the possibility of communism. Nazism, capitalism, and communism: all are ruled out. And thus one is returned to the question of whether any political act is capable of operating at the level of being’s destiny, which is for Heidegger the most fundamental motor of history. Is it possible to have a politics of the thing, which is to say a politics that can respond to or even engineer moments of real singularity and hence global transformation within the homogenized technological whole? Is it in politics that the event can even be prepared for? Does Žižek’s own interpretation of the later Heidegger not suggest that revolutionary action is rather a task for ethics, or perhaps neither politics nor ethics, at least in their traditional acceptations? Žižek’s theoretical project in the realm of politics was from the very beginning to provide an alternative to the deconstructionist view of politics as a pragmatic negotiation of interests in a particular contingent situation which cannot be understood by reference to ontology and truth, but that does not mean that the latter is not in some fundamental way correct, and if Žižek’s position is untenable, it may be politics’ only recourse.49 And we cannot altogether leave behind the question of

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politics because we have good reason to doubt whether a revolution which did not take place at the level of politics would be extensive enough to prevent the ever mounting devastation of the earth from reaching its consummation. NOTES 1 The substance of the first part of this text was presented in a minimal form at the conference on ‘Heidegger and the Global Age’ (University of Sussex, 29–30 October 2015). I must thank Antonio Cerella and Louiza Odysseos for organizing the event and for asking me to speak when the originally scheduled speaker had to withdraw, as well as for their friendly and apposite comments on the text in the first draft of its present form. 2 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Why Heidegger Made the Right Step in 1933’, with the cautious interjection of a footnote that reminds the reader easily affronted, as indeed occurred at the initial reading of the paper upon which the present work is based, ‘albeit in the wrong direction’, originally published in the International Journal of Žižek Studies 1, no. 4 (2007), http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/issue/view/6 (accessed 25 January 2016) and later republished almost unaltered as chapter 3 of In Defence of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008), 95–153. A number of the ideas contained in the present work were first formulated as a ‘Reply to Žižek’ in the same issue. Many thanks to the editors, Paul A. Taylor and David Gunkel, for their permission to rework these ideas here. 3 Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Back from Syracuse?’, trans. John McCumber, Critical Inquiry 15, no. 2 (Winter 1989): 429. 4 Cf. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, trans. Winston Moore and Paul Cammack (London: Verso, 1985). 5 Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London and New York: Verso, 1999), 4. 6 Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 213; and Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1953), 152. 7 Perhaps it would not be redundant to insist here quite brazenly that the reason Nazism was a failure for Heidegger was not so much that it issued in an unforeseen disaster but that it was a non-event, which changed nothing. Heidegger once suggested, with obvious provocation, that two world wars – and that we may presume to include the Holocaust – altered nothing at the level of being. Indeed, the occlusion of the process behind the revelation of truth has become yet more occluded. Here it seems to me that, despite everything that we shall have to say about the translation of Heidegger into a more contemporary jargon, one of the most difficult things as a Heideggerian, at least in non-Heideggerian circles, is to remain absolutely orthodox, at least at those points where Heidegger’s position seems to be most indefensible. For these moments can be the most revelatory to insist upon and to attempt to understand them can take the most laborious and fruitful effort: this would go most of all for



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his two most striking statements regarding the Second World War: that it changed nothing, and that the Holocaust as an event may be considered ‘essentially the same’ as various other technological activities in our epoch. Cf. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, trans. John Glenn Gray and Fred Wieck (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 66; and Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012), 27. One thing we can certainly learn from Heidegger’s mistakes and the endless series of ‘affairs’ is that dismissal and condemnation are not the same as thinking and never constitute a philosophical attitude towards Heidegger’s politics. And indeed this seems to me precisely one of Žižek’s greatest merits as a reader of Heidegger: he takes this idea to its extreme. Far from condemning Heidegger’s political engagement, Žižek identifies it as the very model of a political act. And, indeed, the Holocaust, unlike anti-Semitism in general, has never occupied a central place in Žižek’s thought, and indeed in places he has attempted to argue that the Stalinist purges and gulags were on certain levels if not worse then at least more ‘terrifying’ because of their sheer irrationality and unpredictability. Cf. Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion (London: Verso, 2001), 68. 8 Thus Žižek is able to reverse the position he took in The Ticklish Subject and to see some merit in Heidegger’s statement which caused Habermas such distress and righteous anger, according to which there was an ‘inner truth and greatness’ to National Socialism, and to distinguish its promising form from its obscene content. Cf. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 213/152. 9 Žižek, Ticklish Subject, 21. 10 Jacques Lacan, The Psychoses, 1955–1956: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book III, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 1993), 12ff; and Lacan, Le Seminaire, Livre III, Les Psychoses (Paris: Seuil, 1981), 21ff. 11 Although ‘incomplete’ seems an obvious and almost ideal, idiomatic translation of ‘pas tout’, the author of the present work had to wait until Alenka Zupančič’s Ethics of the Real before it became apparent. Cf. Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan (London: Verso, 2000). 12 Cf. Žižek, ‘Why Heidegger Made the Right Step’, 23. 13 Our vacillation between the political act being prepared for by a separate act of theory and the political act having two serial components perhaps points to a problem in Žižek’s own theory as much as in our exposition of it, for it seems to distinguish between the opening up of site for the event and the event itself. The reason for the distinction here seems to be that Žižek wants to avoid advocating a straightforwardly ‘ontological politics’, for this is precisely the kind of politics for which Heidegger is being criticised. The risk which accompanies this distinction is that Žižek might return to the pragmatic political position of the deconstructionist. In other words, on this scheme, there still comes the incalculable time after the preparation’s end in which mere awaiting is all that is left, without reference either to the current state of things or to the particular nature of that which we are awaiting. This is not just the position associated with Derrida and Laclau but also – by many – with the late Heidegger himself: ‘only a god can save us now’. 14 Žižek, ‘Why Heidegger Made the Right Step’, 36.

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15 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 22/3, 62/38. 16 Cf. ‘the very philosopher who . . . warned again and again against the metaphysical mistake of conferring ontological dignity on some ontic content . . . fell into the trap of conferring on Nazism the ontological dignity of suiting the essence of modern man’. Žižek, Ticklish Subject, 13. 17 Ibid., 50. 18 Žižek, ‘Why Heidegger Made the Right Step’, 40, my emphasis. 19 Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 23–24, cf. also 38. 20 Cf. Michael Lewis, Heidegger and the Place of Ethics (London: Continuum, 2005). 21 Žižek, Parallax View, 24. One should note the way in which, on a close reading of this passage, Žižek first suggests that finitude is epistemological and then affirms it to be ontological, a crucial distinction which for him is represented by the passage from Kant to Hegel. This may not simply be the result of carelessness but perhaps occurs for a reason, and it might lead us to think that Heidegger himself stands on the threshold between these two thinkers. Indeed, precisely the move from the early Heidegger to the later can be understood as a move from a Kantian transcendental understanding of the ontological difference to a Hegelian one, in the sense of a turn to an immanence and its own autonomous differentiation. For an attempt to justify such a reading, see Lewis, Heidegger and the Place of Ethics. By contrast, Thomas Brockelman, in his excellent book on the topic of Žižek and Heidegger, suggests this Hegelian ontologization of finitude is already present in Being and Time. Cf. Thomas Brockelman, Žižek and Heidegger: The Question Concerning Techno-Capitalism (London: Continuum, 2008), xiv. 22 Cf. Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 77. 23 Slavoj Žižek, On Belief (London: Routledge, 2001), 108. 24 Žižek, ‘Why Heidegger Made the Right Step’, 23. 25 Ibid. 26 The German word has received various translations, including the best-known, ‘en-framing’ (Lovitt), ‘frame’ (Stambaugh), ‘stele’ (Lacoue-Labarthe) and most recently ‘positionality’ (Mitchell), but, in this context, the notion of a mould that is used, in a technological or machinic fashion, to produce unlimited identical copies leads us render it, tentatively, as ‘template’, though elsewhere we have been tempted simply by ‘system’, which would stress the totalizing and even the ‘globalizing’ aspect of Gestell. 27 To schematize the course of Heidegger’s trajectory, one might say that the place of truth moves from the individual in the 1920s to the polis or the Volk in the 1930s, and then to the humble thing in the 1940s. By focusing simply on the poles rather than the transitional moment between them we in part mean to indicate the impossible position of the political engagement that is at the heart of what we are considering here. 28 Žižek describes the Lacanian ‘thing’ as a ‘tombstone’. Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 1991), 272. 29 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Thing’, trans. Albert Hofstadter in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 179; and Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1954), 171.



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30 Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 12; Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze, 84. 31 Cf. Manuel Delanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2002), 25–26. 32 Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on “Humanism” ’, in Pathmarks, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 252; and Heidegger, Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1967), 162. 33 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, ed. and trans. William Lovett (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 33; and Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze, 37. 34 If it is not, then this would be to contradict an earlier argument of the present author, whose earlier work attempted precisely to demonstrate the existence of a later Heideggerian politics entirely untainted by the Nazi engagement and the philosophical elements which made it possible, a politics which not incidentally is closely related to a Žižekian critique of ideology. Cf. the conclusion of the author’s Heidegger and the Place of Ethics. The conclusion, together with the chapters devoted to Žižek (which first appeared in the Journal for Lacanian Studies 4, no. 2 [2006]) and Marx in Heidegger beyond Deconstruction (London: Continuum, 2007); the essay in the International Journal of Žižek Studies (‘Reply to Žižek’, International Journal of Žižek Studies 1, no. 4 (2007) http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/ article/view/89/148 [accessed 29 January 2016]); and the present work may be taken as making good on the promise made in the introduction to my first book, to stage an encounter between Heidegger and Marxism. In any case, we can say that, despite everything we shall say here, the later Heidegger may be read in a way that is not at all apolitical. 35 Martin Heidegger, Four Seminars: Le Thor 1966, 1968, 1969, Zähringen 1973, trans. François Raffoul and Andrew J. Mitchell (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003), 80; and Heidegger, Seminare, ed. Curd Ochwadt (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1986), 137. 36 Heidegger, ‘Letter on “Humanism” ’, 271; and Heidegger, Wegmarken, 187. 37 Elsewhere in his oeuvre, Žižek himself has acknowledged this problem as the most pressing in our time. For a reading of Heidegger and Marx in terms of the exploitation of nature and man, respectively, see Heidegger beyond Deconstruction, chapter 5. 38 In fact, I have suggested elsewhere that this would take place under the sign of the psychoanalytic ‘subject’, death-driven and without world. This would be a subject possessed by a counter-natural drive that ‘cannot be reduced to an epoch of being’ or to ‘modern subjectivity bent on technological domination’ (Žižek, ‘Why Heidegger Made the Right Step’, 37). ‘[T]here is, underlying it, a “nonhistorical” subject’ (ibid.), and this would constitute the ‘non-metaphysical core of modern subjectivity itself’ (ibid., 34). And yet there is an ahistorical core in Heidegger’s notion of the history of being, and it is precisely Ereignis itself, as – once again – Žižek elsewhere acknowledges (For They Know Not What They Do, 137, note 2). Heidegger is fully aware that the ‘derangement of man’s position among beings’ [a quotation from Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie], the fact that man’s emergence somehow ‘derails’ the balance of entities, is in a way older

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than Truth itself, its very hidden foundation . . . for Heidegger, the Truth-Event can occur only within such a fundamental ‘ontological imbalance’. The truly problematic and central point is that Heidegger refuses to call this ‘ontological imbalance’ or ‘derangement’ subject. Cf. Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute, or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London: Verso, 2000), 168, note 58. The quote Žižek uses is from Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy: From Enowning, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 237; Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1989), 338. Such a subjectivity, however, is not to be found in Heidegger, apart from the briefest flickering in 1933–1934, the consequences of which were so dire that the light is then snuffed out for good. And yet Žižek will elsewhere, in what is little more than an aside, go even further and admit that there might be such a worldless subject even in Being and Time, in the form of the anxious subject: ‘In the second part [of Being and Time], however . . . the immersion in the life-world itself is not the original fact, but is conceived of as secondary with regard to the abyss of Dasein’s ‘thrown-ness’ . . . which is experienced in the mode of anxiety. . . . [I]t is ultimately from this abyss that we escape into engaged immersion in the world’ (On Belief, 106–107). Although this reading might be guilty of interpreting ‘being-in-the-world’ in the slightly trivial non-Heideggerian way of the inextricable immersion in an ontic environment, which Žižek himself warns against (Ticklish Subject, 62), but if this is a valid interpretation then we could say that the restoration of the world in the aftermath of anxiety is an escape which Dasein makes in its everyday life, and not merely a theoretical mistake born of regret and horror on Heidegger’s part. One might also read an acknowledgement of the subject in Heidegger’s works in Žižek’s remarks on Heidegger’s reading of Socrates in What Is Called Thinking? Socrates was the only one who endured in this gap, who acted as a stand-in and place-holder, who, for his interlocutors, gave body, occupied the space of this gap. All subsequent philosophers concealed this gap by providing a closed ontological edifice. . . . It is crucial here that Heidegger defines Socrates in purely structural terms: what matters is the structural place (of the inconsistency of the Other) he occupies, in which he persists, not the positive content of his teaching. . . . ‘Socrates’ names just a certain POSITION of enunciation (On Belief, 108–109). See my Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction: On Nature, chapter 4, which appeared first in the Journal for Lacanian Studies 4, no. 2 (2006), for a more detailed engagement with this question. The latter text at this point might be considered a companion piece to the current work. 39 ‘ “Only a God Can Save Us Now”: Interview with Der Spiegel (1976)’, in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Wolin, trans. Maria P. Alter and John D. Caputo (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 104; and ‘ “Nur noch ein Gott



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kann uns retten”: Spiegel-Gespräch mit Martin Heidegger am 23. September 1966’, in Der Spiegel, no. 23, 31 May 1976, 206. 40 Ibid. 41 As does Brockelman, who speaks of ‘Heidegger’s Staunch Postwar AntiCommunism’ (Žižek and Heidegger, 22). Žižek does interestingly point out another possibility, which is Heidegger’s apparent interest in the ‘third way’ of Argentinian Peronism, an interest which was mutual. Cf. Žižek, Parallax View, 419, note 33, referring to Guillermo David’s Carlos Astrada: La filosofίa argentina (Buenos Aires: El cielo por asalto, 2004). 42 Heidegger, ‘Letter on “Humanism” ’, 171/259. 43 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 47–8/34. Cf. Heidegger, The History of Beyng, trans. William McNeill and Jeffrey Powell (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 160–61; and Heidegger, Geschichte des Seyns, ed. Peter Trawny (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1998/2012), 189. See also Heidegger, Mindfulness, trans. Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary (London: Continuum, 2006), 207; and Heidegger, Besinnung, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1997), 234. 44 Heidegger, History of Being, 162/191. In the same way, Marx’s work, as a theory of communism, is said to achieve an exceptional understanding of the contemporary situation: ‘Because Marx by experiencing estrangement attains an essential dimension of history, the Marxist view of history is superior to that of other historical accounts’ (‘Letter on “Humanism” ’, 170/259). Although we have to acknowledge that here Marx is speaking precisely of the alienation that is experienced under capitalism, and not communism, in any case, much later, Heidegger will reiterate that ‘Marxism is indeed the thought of today, where the self-production of man and society plainly prevails [herrscht]’ (Four Seminars, 73/387). 45 Heidegger, History of Beyng, 155/182. Many of the relevant passages from The History of Beyng were – to my knowledge – first uncovered and analysed by Beistegui, to whose reading we are here indebted. Cf. Miguel de Beistegui, ‘Questioning Politics, or beyond Power’, European Journal of Political Theory 6, no. 1 (2007): 87–103. 46 Heidegger, History of Beyng, 160–61/189. 47 Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), 86; and Heidegger, Parmenides, ed. Manfred S. Frings (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1982), 127. 48 Technology then presupposes the curious collapse of one of the founding (Aristotelian) oppositions of philosophy, dynamis and energeia, which the phrase ‘potential energy’, available but as yet not expended, involves. 49 Martin Hägglund’s Radical Atheism amounts to a very much implicit but still brave and powerful defence of this Laclauian politics against an unnamed Žižek. Cf. Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).

Part II

ACROSS THE GLOBAL: INFLUENCES

Chapter 5

Images of the World Ontology and History in the Work of Foucault, Schmitt and Heidegger Antonio Cerella In the Foreword to his Traité d’histoire des religions (1949), Mircea Eliade lamented that increasingly in the human sciences ‘it is the scale that makes the phenomenon’.2 Today, we find ourselves in a very similar, albeit reversed, situation: it is the phenomenon that makes the scale. The global extension of capitalism and technology has swallowed up phenomena, and our comprehension of them, within the ‘global paradigm’. All dimensions of living and thinking have become epiphenomena of this new ‘global scale’: we are presented with a global ethics, a global politics, a global economy, a global war and, above all, a global history. It has been suggested that history, from this ‘perspectival crisis’, can only be conceived as ‘the meaningless infinity of the world process’ [der sinnlosen Unendlichkeit des Weltgeschehens].3 Yet this new ‘measure’ – which is in fact a dismeasure – contains an ‘enigma’. As Hannah Arendt foresaw, to think that everything has turned into a ‘process’ – act and action, experience and world, history and nature – ‘implies . . . that the concrete and the general, the single thing or event and the universal meaning, have parted company. The process, which alone makes meaningful whatever it happens to carry along, has thus acquired a monopoly of universality and significance’.4 But what historical experience is still possible at a time when all the most intimate proportions – living, dwelling, acting – are sucked into an empty processuality? What is the meaning and significance of history within a phenomenon – so-called globalization – whereby discrete and continuous, concrete and abstract, seem to merge into the ‘uniformity wherein everything is neither far nor near and, as it were, without distance?’.5 There is no doubt that this crisis is rooted in modernity, and that only now is it erupting in all its force. In fact, concepts such as ‘network’, 109

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‘interdependence’, ‘interconnection’ – through which some seek to characterize the essence of globalization6 – are nothing more than a genealogical complication of the ‘processual indistinction’ inaugurated by modern experience. Our contemporary disproportion, therefore, must be sought in the crisis opened by that experience.

THE COLLAPSE OF THE SKY According to Hannah Arendt, even before being an epistemological, philosophical or political crisis – modernity is determined by a ‘cognitive catastrophe’. The advent of the natural sciences, as a new paradigm of knowledge, implies the collapse of the man-world relation understood as ‘incarnation’, the loss of confidence in human senses as a means to perceive the ‘objectivity’ of reality. The modern age began when man, with the help of the telescope, turned his bodily eyes toward the universe, about which he had speculated for a long time . . . and learned that his senses were not fitted for the universe, that his everyday experience, far from being able to constitute the model for the reception of truth and the acquisition of knowledge, was a constant source of error and delusion.7

This cognitive crisis reverberates in every field of human experience and knowledge, especially at the ontological level. Lost in his own (self-created) world alienation – in the Cartesian de omnibus dubitandum est – and in search for a new anchor of signification, modern man can only hold on to his ‘self’, that is to the only certainty that still appears to him under his control: the capacity for action. The modern aspiration towards vita activa would be born from an act of desperation (the search for a new fulcrum on which to ground knowledge) that, however, over time solidified into a new ontological conception, into the ultimate form of human power over history and nature. Indeed, by nurturing his capacity for action, modern man ‘could not help becoming aware that wherever man acts he starts processes. The notion of process does not denote an objective quality of either history or nature; it is the inevitable result of human action’.8 According to Arendt, this is the epochal turning point. At this juncture, history is transformed into a process, thus assimilating even nature into the territory of action. Everything becomes action within an infinite processuality that, however, does not allow meaningful distinctions. Modern ontology constitutes itself as the power of action for acting because the aim can only



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be acting per se, deprived of historical significance outside of the flow of action. In this regard, a deep gulf separates the modern conception of history from the ancient one. In ancient Greek and Roman times, historical significance was the outcome of a struggle between man and the cosmos, mortality and immortality, history and nature. Man measured the significance of his acts against the immortality of nature and the cosmos, so becoming the subject of historiography, which in fact narrated those ‘great deeds and great words’ that were ‘doomed to be a theme of song among those that shall be born hereafter’.9 The historiographical operation consisted in the poetic gesture of immortalization of heroes and events by means of logos (in the words of Virgil, ‘si quid mea carmina possunt,/Nulla dies umquam memori vos eximet aevo’).10 In turn, the pre-historic, that is ontological, significance of action rested on the communal background from which the hero, with his actions, was able to stand out by shedding light upon it. The limits of the polis gave meaning to the heroic overcoming of limits. It is the existence of a well-defined homeland – Ithaca – that makes Odysseus’s erratic journey heroic and worthy of being immortalized.11 Nothing could be more different than the (post)modern conception of history. Here the subject is forced to seek the meaning and measure of his deeds and words against the disproportion of a limitless process. Thrown into this ‘bad infinity’ of the world, he is pushed to carve out his own cosmos without an idea of order, as it were, but only by participating in the uncontrollable processuality of the historical course, ‘so that in an extreme subjectivism man is ultimately imprisoned in a non-world of meaningless sensations that no reality and no truth can penetrate’.12 For even truth loses its value as the ultimate point of reference when it becomes unbounded and disembodied, that is when it can no longer be physically and emotionally shared. The crisis of modernity begins with the disembodiment of the individual body, but eventually ends up shaking the foundations of the entire political and social body. The idea of processuality it implies, in fact, must necessarily remove all foundations, break all limits – even those of the political space (the state) – thus leaving the subject alone in front of a radical question: ‘what meaning does our being have, if it were not that will to truth has become conscious of itself as a problem in us?’13 THE MUNCHAUSEN LEAP: TRUTH AND HISTORIOGRAPHY As we have seen, the notion of ‘process’ informs the metaphysical background of modernity. From an epistemological standpoint, however, this

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‘crisis’ opens an unbridgeable rift between man and world, concept and reality, theory and history, action and memory.14 As Reinhart Koselleck has put it, ‘[a]t the termination of this historical process of enlightenment stands the discovery of ‘history in and for itself’, which is provoked by a history apprehended in terms of progress. Stated concisely, this discovery involves a transcendental category which joins the conditions of possible history with the conditions of its cognition’.15 In this sense, history becomes the perfectible and infinite dimension, in constant acceleration, which opens human beings to the experience of the new global space. In historiographical terms, however, this conception has been translated into a plural ‘conceptual box’ – the History of histories (die Geschichte) – that gathers together the multiform events of the human happening, thus making them available to the social scientist. ‘Everything is history’ means that one can write the history of everything: historical occurrences become the unproblematic background of knowledge. Nietzsche was among the first to question the assumptions of this historiographical approach. If man is the only master of his own destiny, if he is the subject-object of the historical development, then on what basis can historical knowledge be objectively grounded? What relationship is to be established between language and world, ‘truth’ and its transcribility? In Nietzsche’s words, ‘are designations congruent with things? Is language the adequate expression of all realities?’16 For the German philosopher, language is not capable of a direct mediation between words and things, because an unbridgeable gulf separates them: ‘between two absolutely different spheres, as between subject and object, there is no causality, no correctness, and no expression; there is, at most, an aesthetic relation’.17 History thus becomes a narrative and linguistic problem; historiography is transformed into a rhetorical exercise.18 With the advent of modernity, history and its narration seem to be forced to oscillate between Scylla and Charybdis, between the translucency of the analytical and positivist approaches and the fragility of the linguistic and rhetorical ones. The Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg has sought a ‘third way’ between these two extremes, indicating in the search for the ‘silent proof’ the alethic anchor through which historiography can do history again, that is to reconstruct not only a formal narrative but also a ‘probable historical truth’.19 In what follows, I would like to substantiate Ginzburg’s hypothesis: that is to do history means to reconstruct a void, to make silence speak, to render visible a part of the invisible.20 I want, moreover, to explore why the ‘unsaid’ gives meaning and power to the trace, why potentiality brings life to historical necessity. The assumption of this chapter is that silence – understood, as we shall see, in an ethical and ontological sense – represents the ‘matter’ from which historical experience takes shape and meaning. However, silence – as



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‘imaginific matter’ – is constituted dialectically, that is it constitutes its own constituent.21 In other words, the way in which we imagine and fill the ontological silence that surrounds us, as it were, constitutes the metaphysical form of our knowing and acting. Our actions, therefore, are like the shadow of this invisible presence. In this sense, Hannah Arendt could write: Not the capabilities of man, but the constellation which orders their mutual relationships can and does change historically. Such changes can best be observed in the changing self-interpretations of man throughout history, which, though they may be quite irrelevant for the ultimate ‘what’ of human nature, are still the briefest and most succinct witnesses to the spirit of whole epochs.22

Accordingly, interpretation cannot do without self-interpretation, just as the historical background cannot but reflect a metaphysical image of the world. In this essay, I intend to explore some ways to conceive and give voice to those ‘silent constellations’ described by Arendt. More specifically, I want to deconstruct three modes of conceiving silence and its functions: epistemological, ontic and ontological. In so doing, I discuss the reflections on silence as developed by Michel Foucault, Carl Schmitt, and Martin Heidegger. These authors have conferred an immense import to the poietic force of silence, to its ability to create imagines mundi (i.e., social ontologies). However, their very different conceptions of the ontological silence conceal, in turn, some silent ontologies, that is visions of history that operate, sometimes secretly, in their discourses. One of the aims of this work is to bring out the hermeneutic path that links their philosophies in order to build an initial argument in favour of an archaeology of silence. For, in our opinion, only a profound reconceptualization of silence and its functions can allow us to ‘blow up the continuum of history’, to recall Walter Benjamin’s formulation, that is to confront the flat and forgetful progressivism that represents the metaphysical background of the global age.23 The following pages can be read precisely as a fugue into silence composed of three acts: epistemological (Foucault), ontic (Schmitt) and ontological (Heidegger). FOUCAULT’S SILENCES: EPISTEMOLOGY AND HISTORY In his most accomplished methodological work, L’archéologie du savoir, Foucault describes his ‘archaeology’ as a ‘new history’. It is worth dwelling on the novelty of the Foucauldian conception. ‘History’ – he writes – ‘in its traditional form, undertook to ‘memorize’ the monuments of the past, transform them into documents, and lend speech to those traces which, in themselves, are often non verbal [. . .] in our time, history is that which transforms documents into monuments’.24

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Here we encounter a typical epistemological reversal carried out by Foucault. History should not be conceived as the infinite fragmentation of individual voices dormant in the historical course but, rather, as those discursive aggregates that govern access to knowledge (including historical knowledge). For this reason, it is necessary to replace the analysis of the scattered, singular and unconsciously dominated voices of individuals with that of discourse, its power and epistemic hindrances. Behind Foucault’s methodological move there is, it goes without saying, the influence of Nietzsche and his monumental conception of history.25 But there also lurks another strategy. In elaborating his ‘method’, Foucault has in mind two intellectual adversaries: historicism and positivism. According to him, these historiographical approaches, although claiming the opposite, are still totally impregnated with metaphysical conceptions. They project the shadow of their present on the past (positivist historiography) or on the future (historicism and philosophy of history). These historiographical paths follow an idea of change that is necessary because it is postulated a priori as an eternal origin or necessary end: ‘The historian’s history finds its support outside of time and claims to base its judgments on an apocalyptic objectivity. This is only possible, however, because of its belief in eternal truth, the immortality of the soul, and the nature of consciousness as always identical to itself’.26 Against this vision of a perennial and metaphysical historical progress, Foucault invokes the explanatory power of a ‘general history’, which opposes the search of first principles, origins, and other totalizations and continuities, thus trying to understand the historical course as ‘a space of a dispersion’.27 A dispersion that, as we shall see, is in search of an order or, rather, is forced to order by what Foucault has called ‘will to knowledge’, the ordinative tension inherent in man as homo sapiens loquendi.28 Foucault’s historical conception, both as ‘archaeologist’ and ‘genealogist’, requires therefore a (Nietzschean) overcoming of every metaphysical conception of history, whether understood as ‘the synthetic activity of the subject’29 or as ordering principle which transcends the historical course with its eternal immobility. There would be neither a transcendent principle nor an immanent totality behind the course of history but only the brutal positivity of discourses and their force of exclusive inclusion. It becomes therefore necessary to go beyond, or rather, to the other side of the discourse on the subject and the object by analysing those ‘functions of exclusions’, which are present in and determined by discourses.30 In this sense, Foucault’s idea of history is conceived in light of the ‘death of God’, of the irreparable fracture between truth and world that is reflected in the divide between words and things: the abysmal human finitude so becomes the only immanent infinity capable of historical life.31 For this reason, history



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is to be transformed into an archaeology of discourses and knowledge, into an analysis of historical analysis, a history of the access to the conditions of radical historicity: Instead of seeing in the great mythical book of history, lines of words that translate in visible characters thoughts that were formed in some other time and place, we have in the density of discursive practises, systems that establish statements as events (with their own conditions and domain of appearance) and things (with their own possibility and field of use). They are all these systems of statements (whether events or things) that I propose to call archive.32

The radicality of his analysis notwithstanding, Foucault’s anti-deterministic vision of history rests on a principle of determination. The historical episteme is in fact delimited by ‘invisible’ and feeble ‘boundaries’ that control the occurrence and actualization of discursive practices. This space of dispersion is not only crossed by the disorder of statements and things but also ordered by the ‘group of rules that characterize a discursive practice’,33 that is by what Foucault has called the ‘historical a priori’. Here we encounter the first Foucauldian conception of silence. For the historical a priori is a ‘collective silence’ underlying the discursive practices of an age. More than that, it is the ‘unspeakable’ that enables and delimits the space of the ‘speakable’; that is the epochal silence in which everyone participates, but no one can see and say clearly. In Foucault’s words: ‘This a priori is what, in a given period, delimits in the totality of experience a field of knowledge, defines the mode of being of the objects that appear in that field, provides man’s everyday perception with theoretical powers, and defines the conditions in which he can sustain a discourse about things that is recognized to be true’.34 Let us analyse the logical, seemingly paradoxical, structure of the Foucauldian a priori. This dispositif is not imposed ‘from outside’ and ‘it does not constitute, above events, and in an unmoving heaven, an atemporal structure;’ and yet it provides the historical condition for the positivity of discourses and regulates their occurrence.35 The historical a priori is thought of as an immanence that generates more immanence; but it constitutes a ‘solid’ and ‘coagulated’ state of immanence. An a priori is like a ‘discursive clot’ around which words and speech solidify, self-regulate and finally dissolve themselves. It is both ‘a system of temporal dispersion’ of statements and also ‘itself a transformable group’.36 It is as if immanence, by solidifying into narrative aggregates, transcended itself and then fell back again into the contingent mare magnum from which it originated because, as Foucault put it, the transcendental repeats the empirical.37

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In Foucault’s vision, in short, the historical archive is indeed a living force operating in its own determining; yet this notion is not thought of as mere contingency, but rather as the power of contingency to compel discourse: the archive is not ‘that which collects the dust of statements that have become inert once more, and which may make possible the miracle of their resurrection; it is that which defines the mode of occurrence of the statement-thing; it is the system of its functioning’.38 In this sense, Foucault’s conception of the archive truly seems to be the projection of the ‘Nietzschean world’ into the space of discursive regimes: a space delimited by ‘nothingness’, in which discourses, in continuous oscillation and transformation, continually give rise to new practices and systems of exclusion, disintegrating and reintegrating themselves; a space in which change is the only occurrence that makes constant the repetition of the positivity of discourses, their happening.39 One may be tempted to say that Foucault’s archive is Nietzsche’s world immersed and submerged in language. And just like in the Nietzschean world, power crosses and divides discursive practises and regimes. It is at this conceptual level, then, that the second Foucauldian notion of silence – the one which emerges within discursive regimes – should be analysed: the repressive silence produced by power relations. For one of the effects of power that circulates in the discursive regimes is precisely to act as a threshold of exclusive inclusion: that is to force someone into silence while giving voice to power, to erase a rival oeuvre while building a new discursive monument. The case of madness in the classical age is emblematic. Indeed, as shown by Foucault, the ‘madman’ is in fact ‘constituted’ by a discourse that not only deprives him of his language, words, and world (to confine him in an artificial world, the asylum), but also imposes on him its own history and language: The constitution of madness as a mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, affords the evidence of a broken dialogue, posits the separation as already effected, and thrusts into oblivion all those stammered, imperfect words without fixed syntax in which the exchange between madness and reason was made. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason about madness, has been established only on the basis of such a silence.40

Madness is therefore forced silence, an ‘absence d’oeuvre’ on which Western rationalism has built its historical trajectory. Madness is the void that holds modern logos: ‘Dès sa formulation originaire, le temps historique impose silence à quelque chose que nous ne pouvons plus appréhender par la suite que sous les espèces du vide, du vain, du rien. L’histoire n’est possible que sur fond d’une absence d’histoire, au milieu de ce grand espace de murmures,



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que le silence guerre, comme sa vocation et sa vérité’.41 It is this silent void that Foucault, in his first archaeological work, wants to reconstruct. As is well known, however, the Foucauldian project of an archeology of silence has been the subject of Jacques Derrida’s severe criticism. Among the objections he raises to Foucault’s work in his essay ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’, there is one that is fundamental for our argument: the untranslatability of silence. For how is it possible, Derrida wonders, to give voice to silence in a language which is different from the one ripped out from the madman’s throat? How can one give voice to the silenced – ‘in order to return to innocence and to end all complicity with the rational or political order which keeps madness captive’ – ‘without repeating the aggression of rationalism’?42 If a split between ‘madness’ and ‘rationality’ has now taken place, how can one go back and find a pure language to give voice to that very silence created by the violence of our language (to which everyone, including Foucault, participate)? As Derrida puts it, Total disengagement from the totality of the historical language responsible for the exile of madness, liberation from this language in order to write the archaeology of silence, would be possible in only two ways. Either do not mention a certain silence (a certain silence which, again, can be determined only within a language and an order that will preserve this silence from contamination by any given muteness), or follow the madman down the road of his exile.43

Derrida’s critical remarks must have touched a nerve, because Foucault indeed long meditated his reply. In countering Derrida’s criticism, however, he did not address directly the epistemological objection on the ‘untranslatability of silence in the age of reason’ raised by his younger colleague.44 Perhaps, however, Foucault’s ‘real’ answer should not be sought in his direct reply to Derrida but in one of his collective works: the dossier on Pierre Rivière. In the Foreword to the documentation of this case of patricide in the nineteenth century, he explains in this way the relevance of the project and, at the same time, his renunciation of any direct interpretation of the documents: As to Pierre Rivière’s discourse, we decided not to interpret it and not to subject it to any psychiatric or psychoanalytic commentary. In the first place because it was what we used as the zero benchmark to gauge the distance between the other discourses and the relations arising among them. Secondly, because we could hardly speak of it without involving it in one of the discourses (medical, legal, psychological, criminological) which we wished to use as our starting point in talking about it. If we had done so, we should have brought it within the power relation whose reductive effect we wished to show, and we ourselves should have fallen into the trap it set.45

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It would appear that Foucault eventually embraced Derrida’s criticism: it is not possible to give voice to the silenced without confusing oneself with those powers that produce discourse; that is to say, silence becomes an invisible and insurmountable wall. And given this epistemological impossibility, one can only bring out the material to show ‘the relations of power, domination, and conflict within which discourses emerge and function’.46 This renunciation, however, carries a very high price to pay: the epistemological impossibility of giving voice to the silenced. Following this line of thought, individuals, and their personal stories and experiences, become ‘transcribable’ only as exempla of general rules of exclusion and suppression. And this is precisely the case of Pierre Rivière, which provides ‘material for a thorough examination of the way in which a particular kind of knowledge (e.g., medicine, psychiatry, psychology) is formed and acts in relation to institutions’.47 As Carlo Ginzburg has pointed out, by focusing on thresholds and mechanisms of exclusion and access to discourse, Foucault ended up neglecting the excluded and their stories: ‘Foucault’s ambitious project of an archéologie du silence becomes transformed into silence pure and simple – perhaps accompanied by mute contemplation of an aesthetic kind’. In this way, the possibility of analysing the traces, faces, experiences, and documents of individuals ‘is specifically ruled out because it is held to be impossible to do so without distortion or without subjecting it to an extraneous system of reasoning. The only legitimate reactions that remain are “astonishment” and “silence”’.48 At this point, it is legitimate to ask: apart from the influence of Derrida’s criticism, what are the conceptual reasons behind Foucault’s radical epistemological choice? If we analyse the underlying background of his ‘avalutative silence’, it is possible to delineate an even more profound, ontological, conception of silence that operates, at various levels, in Foucault’s work. Indeed, the various forms of silence that we have tried to describe (epochal, repressive, epistemic) are mutually connected and point towards a peculiar ontological vision that serves as the background to the work of the French philosopher: the nomothetic power of language. In fact, in Foucault’s understanding, language qua language operates as archi-dispositif which produces all other dispositives and thresholds of inclusive exclusion. In other words, the power of language lies in capturing things and savoirs and, at the same time, in appropriating its appropriator (caging him into the things and knowledge that he captured at a given moment). It is just because man is appropriated by language that he can capture the world through discursive acts. The power of language lies in this nomothetic faculty: that is it captures the capturer, defines the definer, appropriates its appropriator. Silence is thus constitutive of language as much as language is constitutive of silence. There



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is no way out from this hall of mirrors. Behind Foucault’s ontology of silence hides the mystery of the presupposing power of language. SCHMITT’S SILENCES: VIOLENCE AND CONTINGENCY Carl Schmitt had already discussed the nomothetic power of language in an important essay included in a Festschrift in honour of Erich Przywara.49 In it, by exploring the relation between Nahme and name, ‘power and namegiving’, Schmitt shows how the dynamics of territorial appropriation are always accompanied by a linguistic appropriation – a naming in fact: ‘A land-appropriation is constituted only if the appropriator is able to give the land a name’.50 In this case, too, language is understood as a nomothetic force. Unlike Foucault, however, for Schmitt language is the instrument by which a space is sacralized; it is the logos which delimits a new world. This process of sacralization represents the ‘positive’ side of power, the public form through which it becomes inhabitable: ‘In a name and in name-giving, a third orientation of power takes effect: the tendency to visibility, publicity, and ceremony’.51 For if the power is characterized by a natural tendency to secrecy, the act of name-giving – by linguistically appropriating space – opposes ‘the satanic attempt to keep power invisible, anonymous, and secret’.52 The peculiarity of human language, therefore, would consist in the ability to name its own nomos, thus giving a public form to power. For Schmitt, this would constitute a primaeval form of orientation: the ceremonial aspect of power would make it visible, thus opening and limiting the space of experience of political communities. In this sense, language is always räumlich; behind silence, on the contrary, the invisible and temporal dimension of power would hide. The problem of political representation, then, would lie in this dialectic between the visible and invisible, spatial and temporal orders, Ordnung and Ortung.53 But if it is true that language is equipped with a nomothetic power, what lies behind the ‘satanic invisibility’ mentioned by Schmitt? What hides behind the ‘negative of language’, in the silence of power? To answer these questions, it is necessary to analyse in detail Schmitt’s philosophy of history as he has developed it in some of his works, especially in Political Theology. Among the various meanings that Schmitt attributes to his notion of ‘secularization’, one stands for its historical-epochal relevance: ‘political theology’ is seen as a twofold dynamic of emptying and (re)occupation of the conceptual apparatus and of the historico-metaphysical structure of Christianity.54 The key to understanding the analogical, although conflicting, link between theology and politics is the chiasmatic relationship between miracle

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and exception: ‘The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical ideas of the state developed in the last centuries’.55 To Schmitt, the exception is that which constantly exceeds the rationalistic conception of the state, highlighting the irrationalist root on which modern reason has erected its logos. In this sense, modern politics as a whole would have experienced a crisis of emptying – but not overcoming – of theological concepts and categories (from legitimacy to legality, from miracle to exception, from reason to rationalism, etc.). This relationship of exclusion-inclusion and co-belonging between modernity and religion, politics and theology, reverberates similarly on the epistemological level. For this reason, Political Theology is also a ‘method’, – the sociology of juristic concepts – a hermeneutics capable of interpreting the ‘major problem concerning the individual stages of the process of secularization’.56 In a fundamental essay, The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations, Schmitt reconstructs the ‘ontological shifts’ and historical stages – ‘from the theological to the metaphysical [. . .], from there to the humanitarian-moral, and, finally, to the economic’ – that have characterized European history in the last four centuries. To each of these stages corresponds, according to him, a conceptual agitation and dislocation: All essential concepts are not normative but existential. If the center of intellectual life has shifted in the last four centuries, so have all concepts and words. [. . .] The greatest and most egregious misunderstandings (from which, of course, many impostors make their living) can be explained by the erroneous transfer of a concept at home in one domain (e.g., only in the metaphysical, the moral, or the economic) to other domains of intellectual life. [. . .] [a]ll concepts such as God, freedom, progress, anthropological conceptions of human nature, the public domain, rationality and rationalization, and finally the concepts of nature and culture itself derive their concrete historical content from the situation of the central domains and can only be grasped therefrom.57

Similarly to Foucault, therefore, Schmitt believes that both history and access to knowledge are determined by ‘social ontologies’ – what he calls Zentralgebiete – epistemic domains that inform our conceptual and existential apparatuses. These ‘central domains’ of intellectual life have the power to limit areas of knowledgeability; indeed, as we shall see, they are the result of an existential struggle. The Zentralgebiete represent, almost like in Foucault, historical a priori, silent imaginaries, spaces of dispersion in which history, its conceptualization and the metaphysical imagination are reflected into each other, thus creating a sort of existential and spiritual unity based on this ‘game of mirrors’ and cross-references. As Schmitt has it: ‘The metaphysical image



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that a definite epoch forges of the world has the same structure as what the world immediately understands to be appropriate as a form of its political organization [. . .] metaphysics is the most intensive and the clearest expression of an epoch’.58 The metaphysical self-projection that surrounds men in a specific age is, according to Schmitt, the silent and invisible background that gives meaning to the conceptual and political organization of that age. But if it is true that European history is characterized by metaphysical stages, how is it possible to explain their evolution? What lies behind this sketched ‘philosophy of history’, behind this relation between the visibility of political orders and the invisibility of their metaphysical forms? According to Schmitt, this slow and continuous ‘tendency toward neutralization’ would be guided by the search for a peaceful and stable political order. Behind the ‘striving for a neutral domain’ would lie the search for a ‘safe’ political form capable of protecting order from its nemesis, the political; that is the violence that originally shaped and eventually dismembered political modernity: Europeans always have wandered from a conflictual to a neutral domain, and always the newly won neutral domain has become immediately another arena of struggle, once again necessitating the search for a new neutral domain. Scientific thinking was also unable to achieve peace. The religious wars evolved into the still cultural yet already economically determined national wars of the nineteenth century and, finally, into economic wars. The evidence of the widespread contemporary belief in technology is based only on the proposition that the absolute and ultimate neutral ground has been found in technology, since apparently there is nothing more neutral.59

In Schmitt’s work, in short, violence is conceived as the incommensurable and unstoppable motor that continually produces the various political and symbolic forms of European history. History, its concepts and interpretation, as well as the metaphysical background against which it projects its own measure, would be generated by the power of immanence. This power is violence, which drags transcendence in its own world, thus tracing the course of secularization. It is for this reason that the figure of the katechon occupies such an important place in his work. This figure of order is thought to hold the nihilistic and neutralizing drift that affects European politics. Nonetheless, although this political drift must be somehow combated, it is indeed inevitable: every additional bulwark built to stem it cannot but push entropy towards its end and unconcealment. Technology is at the heart of this global permanent revolution, as it has led the old world to the end, that is to the unpolitical. This is because technology has occupied, and at the same time emptied, the last Zentralgebiet (central domain). It is as if in search of neutrality, and on the

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run from the political, mankind ended up neutralizing itself, landing into ‘the cultural nothingness’.60 This philosophy – but it would be better to call it eschatology – of history finds its conceptual fulfilment in Schmitt’s most controversial work, State, Movement, People. In it, Schmitt defines the people as the ‘unpolitische Seite’ of the triadic structure of political unity, that is to say as ‘the apolitical side, growing under the protection and in the shadow of political decisions’.61 Here the people are no longer conceived as a historical community but rather as a biopolitical mass that constantly needs to be galvanized and politicized. In this biopolitical conception of the world, death and sacrifice for the country become the anonymous rules that regulate and constitute the meaning of history. Individuals are functional only as sacrificial subjects within the body of Leviathan. In fact, as Schmitt put it, only public death – that is on behalf of the state – is capable of creating and bestowing a political meaning. Even suicide is described as a mere, desperate deed outside the domain of politics and its ‘sacrificial rituals’: One does not commit suicide because one hates or loves oneself. Such explanations – self-love or self-hatred – are not satisfactory in the least. The answer can only lie in the immediate symbolism of the physical action of suicide (der körperlichen Selbstmordhandlung). The physical act of killing is an essential part of it. Thus the important question is: is this action capable of a form (Form) and a rite (Ritus)? [. . .] Those who are forced to participate in a civil war are compelled to kill with no formally correct legal support. In this situation, can suicide prevent my killing at the hands of my opponent? Or is it the overall situation of civil war that (self-destruction, the suicide of the μάκρος ἄνϑρωπος) – while not justifying or condoning the suicide of individual participants – which reabsorbed this act because of the special virtues of the situation? [. . .] In effect, I can kill myself only to take my life, but it is the enemy that takes it from me; I establish only the modus morendi.62

This pan-politicization of life – by means of which only the public enemy and sacrifice (pro patria mori) can make life and politics significant – ends up de-humanizing history, reversing historical concreteness (so dear to Schmitt) into its opposite: the obliteration of individualities from the body of history and the body politic. As Schmitt put it, one cannot die privately inside the Leviathan, or rather only the state can give sense and meaning to individual deaths: ‘The individual may voluntary die for whatever reason he may wish. That is, like everything in an essentially individualist liberal society, a thoroughly private matter – decided freely upon’.63 From Schmitt’s perspective, therefore, the politico-historical order rests on a significant violence, outside of which there is just room for private mourning and the silence of grief: that is the invisible and demonic face power. In



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this sense, history resembles a placeless and nameless cemetery, a mass grave of the political and metaphysical forms in which individuals, and the memory of their faces and stories, are forced into silence, into ‘voiceless’ and inward mourning. Violence, in and of Schmitt’s thought, is this silent background that constantly moves the boundaries of history and of its metaphysical elements upon which man is clinging like a nameless castaway. Against this de-humanizing and totalizing vision of history and of its silences, Jacob Taubes has poetically written: ‘Earth and sea – without human beings, the elements after all remain ‘matter’ (not even ‘matter’) – When humanism has been depleted [. . .] then that only means, does it not, that the question concerning human being is just posed more radically’.64 HEIDEGGER’S SILENCES: TEMPORALITY AND WIEDERHOLUNG Both the life and work of Martin Heidegger are punctuated by silences. This ‘dimension’ can be therefore articulated in several ways: there is a silence understood by Heidegger as a source of communication and origin of language, or the silence of the earth envisaged as a poietic call that gives substance to man’s journey, or the epochal one that accompanies the dialectic between concealment and unconcealment, thus articulating the epochs of being; moreover, there is the poetic silence full of thought of man, ‘shepherd of being’, who lies at the source of the clearing, and last but not least, Heidegger’s existential silence, because he has never publicly addressed and acknowledged his personal involvement with Nazism and the tragedy of the Shoah.65 What interests us here, however, is not the Heideggerian notion of silence tout court but a particular understanding of silence which can be found in the early Heidegger: Dasein’s relationship with its ‘past’, with the ‘collective silence’ which forms, according to Heidegger’s own formulation, ‘the heritage of possibilities’ we inherited.66 For, in our opinion, here lies the key to understanding the German philosopher’s existential silence as well; if it is true, as he himself said to Karl Löwith, that ‘his concept of ‘historicity’ formed the basis of his political “engagement” ’.67 As we shall try to show, there is a void that crosses the relationship between the ontological structure of Heideggerian temporality and its actualization; and that void represents the abyss in which history, by becoming action, can always collapse. This is the historical silence that surrounds Dasein’s ethical choice in Being and Time, and that Heidegger was unable to fully voice. To explore the relation between ontology and history, as it reflects the originary

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structure of temporality, is therefore extremely important for the purpose of bringing to light the ‘black hole’ in which the philosopher of Meßkirch unfortunately fell. But to do this, it is necessary to recall Heidegger’s conceptualization of historicity, as it was developed in his magnum opus. The expression ‘history of the Present’ [‘Geschichte der Gegenwart’] makes its first, ‘strong’, appearance in Being and Time (§76), where Heidegger enigmatically interrogates the ‘historiological disclosure of history’ [die historische Erschließung von Geschichte] and its ontological structure that is ‘rooted in the historicality of Dasein’ [in der Geschichtlichkeit des Daseins verwurzelt].68 But in what sense are history, temporality and ontology intimately related? As usual, Heidegger’s analysis conceals more than it reveals. In §72 of Being and Time, Heidegger interrogates this ontological structure of history. ‘In analyzing the historicality of Dasein’ – he writes – ‘we shall try to show that this entity is not ‘temporal’ because it ‘stands in history’, but that, on the contrary, it exists historically and can so exist only because it is temporal in the very basis of its Being’.69According to him, it is the originary structure of temporality which also determines that of history. In a certain particular sense, it is not time that is in history but rather is it history that is in time. For originary temporality represents the ontological structure of Dasein’s being-in-the-world: ‘entities are historical only by reason of their belonging to the world. But the world has a historical kind of Being because it makes up an ontological attribute of Dasein’.70 And in fact, even Dasein’s fundamental ontological determination, care (Sorge) ‘is grounded in temporality. Within the range of temporality, therefore, the kind of historizing which gives existence its definitely historical character must be sought’.71 Temporality, in turn, understood as the ontological structure of ex-sistence,72 receives its ‘movement’ from the aheadness of Dasein as ‘being-possible’. According to Heidegger, Dasein is always ontologically stretched out towards its becoming: ‘Understanding signifies one’s projecting oneself upon one’s current possibility of Being-in-the-world; that is to say, it signifies existing as this possibility’.73 The original structure of temporality is thus thought of as ‘bipolar’ or bivalent: ‘We are an existential movement that is ever thrown-ahead-and-returing, stretched out (erstreckt) beyond ourselves while still remaining present to ourselves and the things we encounter’.74 This means that the structure of temporality (Zeitlichkeit) should not be understood temporally: Dasein’s bouncing forth and back is not to be conceived as a diachronical or chronological ‘movement’ (as in the future-presentfuture relation) but rather as ‘a stretched-open expanse, which is finite insofar as it is open and thus bound up with unrealized possibilities’.75 Temporality is, in this sense, like a field of bipolar tensions in which the relation between the present and future, actuality and becoming, remains open and fluid, constantly pushing the actual into the possible and the possible into the actual.76



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This structure of originary temporality is not ‘transcendental’, as has been suggested,77 but rather rests on the radical finitude of human ex-sistence, which, in turn, represents a sort of cut that breaks the linear surface of time. In fact, when Heidegger discusses his notion of authenticity, he wants to align the existential structure (existentiell) with the ontological one of temporality (existential) to show how to make active and productive the radical finitude which is the latent, but always already present, dimension in and of Dasein.78 ‘In taking over our thrown-aheadness’, as Thomas Sheehan has aptly put it, ‘we personally become what we already essentially are: ourselves as mortal possibility’.79 This dimension – authenticity – should not thus be conceived as a ‘past’ or a memory to be rediscovered, but rather as the latency of sense that death and finitude always already co-imply at the very core of Dasein. Conceptual problems arise when Heidegger seeks to apply this dynamic and bivalent structure and temporality to history; that is to say, when he tries to fill the void that divides the ontological from the praxeological level. These two plans are not completely overlapping but rather, as we shall see, signal a (ethical and epistemic) fracture in the conceptual architecture of Being and Time. This problematique becomes particularly evident in the Heideggerian conceptualization of the (historical) past. In this case, too, Heidegger does not conceive the past as something ‘gone’ and no longer effective ‘today’, but as a sort of latency, an energy present yet in ‘inactive form’. The ‘antiquities’ preserved in museums (household gear, for example) belong to a ‘time which is past’; yet they are still present-at-hand in the ‘Present’. How far is such equipment historical, when it is not yet past? Is it historical, let us say, only because it has become an object of historiological interest, of antiquarian study or national lore? But such equipment can be a historiological object only because it is in itself somehow historical. [. . .] [T] hat specific character of the past which makes it something historical, does not lie in this transience, which continues even during the Being-present-at-hand of the equipment in the museum. What, then, is past in this equipment? What were these ‘Things’ which today they are no longer? [. . .] What is ‘past’? Nothing else than that world within which they belonged to a context of equipment and were en- countered as ready-to-hand and used by a concernful Dasein who was-inthe-world. That world is no longer. But what was formerly within-the-world with respect to that world is still present-at-hand.80

Heidegger understands the past as a wealth of possibilities, references and meanings that lie silent in those things, objects and sources that we inherited. These traces are like references of signification that indicate to us the ‘inactive potentialities’ of dormant yet disappeared cultural worlds. The ‘inactivity’ which characterizes the past, in turn, is due to the fact that the historiographical and existential interpretation of history is always

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mediated by what Heidegger calls das Man (‘they-self’ or ‘crowd-self’). Lost in the average everydayness of the crowd, Dasein is incapable of opening history futuristically, that is to reactivate the potential dormant in the historical course: In inauthentic historicality . . . the way in which fate has been primordially stretched along has been hidden. With the inconstancy of the they-self Dasein makes present its ‘today’. In awaiting the next new thing, it has already forgotten the old one. The ‘they’ evades choice. Blind for possibilities, it cannot repeat what has been, but only retains and receives the ‘actual’ that is left over, the world-historical that has been, the leavings, and the information about them that is present-at-hand. Lost in the making present of the ‘today’, it understands the ‘past’ in terms of the ‘Present’.81

Heidegger’s interpretation of inauthentic historicity raises a number of issues about history and its authentic opening. For, if our understanding of the past is always inauthentically mediated by the average interpretation of the crowd, how can we reopen history, that is access our past authentically? How is it possible to free the latent yet unexpressed potentialities of our common heritage? How can we authentically represent and set free what is nolonger-existing? It is at this point, then, that Heidegger, to overcome the impasse, introduces another fundamental concept in his analysis of historicity: Wiederholung or ‘repetition’. For him, the repetition – but it would be better to translate this term as ‘reactivation’ or ‘setting free’82 – of the past is the fundamental gesture that allows us to revive its authentic possibilities, that is to say, to link our future to our past, so allowing us to live meaningfully their actualization in the present: when historicality is authentic, it understands history as the ‘recurrence’ of the possible. [. . .] The delimitation of the primordial theme of historiology will have to be carried through in conformity with the character of authentic historicality and its disclosure of ‘what-has-been-there’ – that is to say, in conformity with repetition as this disclosure. In repetition the Dasein which has-been-there is understood in its authentic possibility which has been. The ‘birth’ of historiology from authentic historicality therefore signifies that in taking as our primary theme the historiological object we are projecting the Dasein which has-been-there upon its ownmost possibility of existence.83

But the questions raised earlier still echo unanswered here. Again: how can we ‘repeat’ or authentically ‘reactivate’ the past if we are always already mixed up in the average everydayness of the crowd? How can Dasein pull itself up from the interpretive swamp of das Man and revive the ‘authentic’ potential of the past? Due to the impossibility of finding an internal way out of this hermeneutic circle, Heidegger is forced to elaborate his decisionistic



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vision of history and action. In other words, he cannot but think a ‘leap’, ‘a moment of vision’, through which Dasein – by transcending the average everydayness – is able to project a ‘new’ and ‘pure’ light upon the past. And even this ‘leap’ – which is different from the Kierkegaardian leap into the abyss of faith – is aligned with the ontological structure of temporality described above.84 In fact, the ‘reactivation’ of the historical past is (ontologically) possible precisely because of the structure of temporality.85 The opening of history is therefore only achievable when Dasein, in a ‘moment of vision’, assumes the historical-epochal responsibility of its ‘destiny’, leaps out of average everydayness, and reactivates the latent possibilities that it has inherited. Thus Heidegger’s protreptic vision of history appears to be a sort of reversed teleology: the future (understood as ‘fate’, Schicksal) reopens the authentic possibility for action by shedding a new light on the past (which is always already present but latent): ‘The moment of vision . . . temporalizes itself . . . in terms of the authentic future’.86 But there is more. For the notion of ‘common destiny’ is like a beacon that illuminates past possibilities but without conferring upon them any historico-existential form. This means that in order to transform the historical dynamis into enérgheia, potentiality into actuality, it is necessary to make a decision for a model, a choice for an empty yet concrete historical form: ‘the authentic repetition of a possibility of existence that has been – the possibility that Dasein may choose its hero – is grounded existentially in anticipatory resoluteness; for it is in resoluteness that one first chooses the choice which makes one free for the struggle of loyally following in the footsteps of that which can be repeated’.87 And here all the problems of Heidegger’s ‘philosophy of history’ come to light. By conceptually applying the ontological structure of ex-sistence to historical praxis, Heidegger develops an empty, almost metaphysical, protreptic discourse. The fundamental notions underpinning the existential structure of Dasein’s historical decisions are so rarefied and abstract to assume metaphysical connotations. Following Heidegger’s line of thought, historical realities are stripped of all substantive living contents, and the line of difference between choosing one’s own ‘hero’ and a ‘charismatic leader’ thus becomes dangerously thin. ‘Fate’, ‘destiny’, ‘heroes’, ‘moment of vision’ become ‘empty shells’, ahistorical and de-historicized notions that can be filled at will, dependent on the historical moment. As Karl Löwith has rightly argued, ‘[t]he apodeictic character of Heidegger’s emotive formulations [. . .] provoke an insidious desire to snub. It is the level of discourse, and not of method, which defines the internal differences among a ‘community of followers’; and in the end it is ‘fate’ which justifies all willing and confers its metaphysical mantle on the latter’.88

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Starting from human finitude, therefore, Heidegger has ended up reversing his hermeneutics of facticity into a sort of metaphysics of history, so undermining the protreptic apparatus of his work. Radical human finitude, which was the speculative fulcrum of his conceptual architecture, has been shelved in favour of a heroic vision of history, of its (empty) models, and its Wagnerian forms (‘the common fate’). By means of Heidegger’s conceptualization, human existence is stripped-down and brought before nothingness, suspended in this abyss of sense, deprived ‘of peace and joy, and proud of its contempt of happiness and human compassion’.89 From this standpoint, ‘authentic life’ is like a space crystallized into ‘the ‘white temple’ that rises beyond it into the “timelessness” ’,90 while human existence and its historical possibilities are always conceived in opposition to the mediocrity of the average man and his inauthentic humanity.91 In short, the silence that resonates in Heidegger’s ‘philosophy of the history’ is that of the voiceless voices and nameless faces of those ordinary individuals that are concealed behind the conceptual veil of das Man. The dangerous gulf between ontology and history in his thinking could perhaps be bridged only by analyzing a dimension with which Heidegger never explicitly wanted to confront himself: an ethics of finitude. CONCLUSION: THE MATTER OF SILENCE In this chapter, I have tried to articulate some conceptions of silence as they emerge – often unknowingly – from the work of Foucault, Schmitt, and Heidegger.92 Although different in terms of political purpose, narrative register and ideological commitment, their discourses imply a common ‘epistemic sacrifice’: the disappearance of the individual and its concrete historicity. The fundamental notions that inform their conceptual apparatuses – Foucault’s power, Schmitt’s order, Heidegger’s destiny – are so rarefied that they end up swallowing up individuals and their stories within a metaphysics of history. ‘Power’, ‘order’ and ‘destiny’ thus constitute a kind of metaphysical screen behind which those individualities suffocated by power relations – and that form the constellation of the ‘past’ – disappear. But precisely in relation to this dimension of power in history, we believe that a revision of the conceptualization of history of these authors is still useful, possible, and, in some respects, necessary. For if power, following Foucault, is that force that imposes itself at the expense of another form-of-life or potentiality, then its ‘hidden face’ must lie in the disappearance that permitted its emergence. The ‘evidence’ of power’s manifestation should not be sought in its being-here – in its positivity – but in the forced disappearance that has been produced. For a positivity can



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manifest itself or exist because of a ‘hidden power’, not directly visible or evident, allows it. Positivity in itself is no evidence. Only its emergence against other potentialities redesigns the pattern of power relations. To do history, therefore, also means to deal with those ‘repressed memories’ and ‘disappeareances’ that are concealed by power because, in this sense, murderer and victim are always intimately related. But if it is true that the signs of power should be sought in the victims – that is in the potentialities that it has repressed – then it becomes even more urgent to rethink the historiographical operation as an ethical and deontological gesture. In Heideggerian terms, shedding new light on the past to reactivate its authentic forms must necessarily mean giving a voice and a face to the silence of the victims suffocated in the bloody imagination of an age. We can find a beautiful example of this in Patricio Guzmán’s documentary Nostalgia for the Light. In it, the director explores the themes of the past, present and future in light of the problem of historical memory. Guzmán addresses these issues by means of a comparison between the figure of the scientist – who seeks in the ‘past present’ of the universe the cosmic signs of our common future – and a group of women who, for more than forty years, have been searching for the bodies and remains of their loved ones, who disappeared in the immense desert of Atacama, in Chile, where the Pinochet regime first killed and then abandoned them to oblivion. The testimony of one of these women is at once poignant and exemplary. She recounts the moment when, after years of relentless search, she managed to found a piece of her past: her brother’s foot. She brought it home, and spent the whole night and the next morning staring at it and caressing the little piece of bone. Then, in the afternoon, she broke into tears, as she finally realized that she had encountered her pasado desaparecido again, although in the form of remains. Yet, she continues, the encounter was, at the same time, ‘beautiful and disappointing’. It was beautiful because her brother had been brought back from silence to life and made present again; disappointing because only then did she realize that he was actually dead. In that very moment her past became present again and could be consigned to memory and mourning. It reappeared from silence and returned to silence but in another form: it did not disappear once again, since it was still present but no-longer-living in the ‘now’: it became a ‘past future’, a memory that spatialized her becoming. In this extraordinary testimony, we encounter a different, ethical understanding of historical silence. This is not a voiceless silence ‘beyond words, but the silence of the Pietà. It is not a silence of death but the silence of the mystery of death’.93 It is the silence of our radical and insuppressible finitude; the ethical call of all those missing persons who demand to be repossessed of a voice, of their face, of a place for memory.94 In other words, all those

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nameless, faceless deaths form an immense past power with no history; the memory of the survivors can throw a light through which this past becomes a historical force in the making, a destiny to be set free. The historiographical operation consists therefore in bringing out these traces – our traces – from silence in order to revive them as our becoming. Memory, Hannah Arendt has argued, gives depth to life, it is the dimension that spatializes existence precisely because it makes us live the time of recollection, connecting us with the silence of the past and rebuilding the space of our dwelling. ‘To dwell’, in fact, ‘means to inhabit the traces left by one’s own living, by which one always retraces the lives of one’s ancestors’.95 Silence is this invisible thread that can help us to reconstruct the place of temporality, a ‘place’ in which space and time merge in human experience. However, to do this, we have to renounce any heroic vision of history, and root ourselves again in our most intimate humanity. Today, the hero can no longer be the model of history; man, as ens historicum, must recognize himself in the humility of his suffering. Only then will silence find its authentic human dimension and be able to reconstitute the faces of the missing, of the others, and to see in each of them the most profound and radical reflection of our common destiny: the infinity of human finitude. In the poetic words of the Swiss writer Max Picard: Two human faces look upon each other. A silence ensues. A silence that does not arise from the earth, but from eternity. Two faces look upon each other, and for a moment time ceases and stands still. And all the hours that are hidden away in time begin to strike together, and as they strike, a marvelous tone dwells in the air, and, in this loud silence of the hours, eternity enters. Thus does time call up eternity.96

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author would like to thank Arthur Bradley for the constructive comments and suggestions to an earlier version of the text. NOTES 1 Roland Barthes, Michelet, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 102–3. 2 Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), xvii.



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3 Max Weber, ‘Die Objektivität sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis’, in Gesammelte Aufsätze Wissenschaftslehre (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1922), 180. 4 Hannah Arendt, ‘The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern’, in Arendt, Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking Press, 1961), 64. 5 Martin Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012), 4. 6 For an overview, see David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt and Jonathan Perraton, Global Transformations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999). 7 Arendt, ‘The Concept of History’, 54–55. 8 Ibid., 62, my emphasis. 9 Homer, Iliad, Book VI, 424–26. 10 ‘If my poetry has any power,/no day shall ever blot you from the memory of time’. Æneid, 9, 446–47. 11 ‘The goddess dispersed the mist and the land appeared. Then Odysseus rejoiced at finding himself again in his own land, and kissed the bounteous soil; he lifted up his hands and prayed to the nymphs, saying, “Naiad nymphs, daughters of Zeus, I made sure that I was never again to see you, now therefore I greet you with all loving salutations, and I will bring you offerings as in the old days, if Zeus’ redoubtable daughter will grant me life, and bring my son to manhood” ’. Homer, The Odyssey, Book XIII, 352. 12 Arendt, ‘The Concept of History’, 56. 13 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 119. 14 On the problem of action in the so-called global age, see the contributions of Lucas and Lewis in this volume. Weber had already spoken of a hiatus irrationalis between concept and reality. Cf. Max Weber, ‘Roscher and Knies and the Logical Problems of Historical Economics’, in Max Weber: Collected Methodological Writings, ed. Hans H. Bruun and Sam Whimster (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 12. As Guy Oakes put it: ‘There is a hiatus because reality cannot be derived from concepts. And it is irrational because reality can only be rationalized by conceptualizing it, which according to the analytical theory is impossible’. Cf. Guy Oakes, ‘Max Weber and the Southwest German School: Remarks on the Genesis of the Concept of the Historical Individual’, in Max Weber and His Contemporaries, ed. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Jürgen Osterhammel (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 440. 15 Reinhart Koselleck, ‘ “Space of Experience” and “Horizon of Expectation”: Two Historical Categories’, in Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantic of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 255, my emphasis. Similar considerations can be found in Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 219–21. 16 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’, in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche Notebooks of the Early 1870’s, ed. Daniel Breazeale (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1979), 81.

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17 Ibid., 86. 18 As well known, this sceptical and relativist vision has been revisited and taken up by Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and, more recently, Hayden White, to name only a few of the most popular authors. See Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Foucault, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, trans. R. Hurley (New York: New Press, 1998); Roland Barthes, ‘The Discourse of History’, trans. S. Bann, Comparative Criticism, 3 (1981): 7–20; and Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). 19 Carlo Ginzburg, History, Rhetoric, and Proof (Hanover and London: University Press of New England), 46. 20 As the Italian philologist Maurizio Bettini puts it: ‘To understand a culture, sometimes it is as useful to reflect on what is absent from that culture as to study what is actually present in it’. Cf. Maurizio Bettini, ‘Missing Cosmogonies: The Roman Case?’, Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 13, no. 1 (2012): 69. 21 I take the idea of the ‘historicity of silence’ from Ivan Illich’s rereading of Gaston Bachelard’s work: ‘I want to explore the historicity of matter, the sense that an epoch’s imagination has given to the canvas on which it paints its imaginings, to the silence of a room into which it projects its music, to the space that it fills with the aura that it can taste or smell’. Cf. Ivan Illich, H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness (London and New York: Marion Boyars, 1986), 4–5. 22 Arendt, ‘The Concept of History’, 62, my emphasis. 23 On the ‘historical presentism’ that characterizes the contemporary age, see François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity. Presentism and Experiences of Time, trans. S. Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 24 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), 7. 25 It is important to note that Foucault, in his later works and after his shift towards genealogy, tried to recover not only the Nietzschiean conception of a monumental history but also Nietzsche’s ‘triadic understanding’ of critical history. See, for example, Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, 382–89. 26 Ibid., 379. 27 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 10. 28 This point was developed, in a more markedly ontological fashion, by Giorgio Agamben in his Infancy and History. The Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London and New York: Verso, 1993), 7; and Agamben, The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). 29 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 14. 30 See Michel Foucault, ‘The Discourse on Language’, in Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 232. 31 Cf., for example, Foucault, The Order of Things, 370: ‘There exists a historicity of man which is itself its own history but also the radical dispersion that provides a foundation for all other histories’.



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32 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 128. Foucault’s analysis echoes – and radicalizes – that of Nietzsche on the different ontological regimes that characterize reality and language, signs and the signified. In Les mots et les choses, he had already explored this problematique in what he defined as the ‘Classical age’: From the seventeenth century onward, the whole domain of the sign is divided between the certain and the probable: that is to say, there can no longer be an unknown sign, a mute mark. This is not because men are in possession of all the possible signs, but because there can be no sign until there exists a known possibility of substitution between two known elements. The sign does not wait in silence for the coming of a man capable of recognizing it: it can be constituted only by an act of knowing. . . . In its perfect state, the system of signs is that simple, absolutely transparent language which is capable of naming what is elementary . . . it was the sign system that linked all knowledge to a language . . . The fundamental task of Classical ‘discourse’ is to ascribe a name to things, and in that name to name their being. For two centuries, Western discourse was the locus of ontology. Foucault, The Order of Things, 59, 62–63, 120. 33 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 127. 34 Foucault, The Order of Things, 158. 35 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 127. 36 Ibid. 37 Foucault, The Order of Things, 316. 38 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 129. 39 In particular, Foucault’s account of history – characterized and stirred by perennial changes and tensions – strongly recalls Nietzsche’s characterization, in a famous page of his diary, of the world from the perspective of the will to power, cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Book, 1968), 549–50. 40 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization. A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. R. Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), x–xi. 41 Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits, tome I: 1954–1969 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 163: ‘From its originary formulation, historical time imposes silence on a thing that we can no longer apprehend, other than by addressing it as void, vanity, nothingness. History is only possible against the backdrop of the absence of history, in the midst of a great space of murmurings, that silence fights like its vocation and its truth’. 42 Jacques Derrida, ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’, in Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 40–41. 43 Ibid., 42, emphasis in original. 44 See Michel Foucault, ‘My Body, This Paper, This Fire’, Oxford Literary Review, 4, no.1 (2012): 9–28. 45 Michel Foucault (ed.), I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother, trans. Frank Jellinek (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), xiii, my emphasis.

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46 Ibid., xi. 47 Ibid. 48 Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms. The Cosmos of a SixteenthCentury Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), xviii. 49 Carl Schmitt, ‘Nomos-Nahme-Name’, in Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. Gary L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2006), 336–50. 50 Ibid., 348. 51 Ibid., 349. 52 Ibid. 53 On this, see Carl Schmitt, Constitutional Theory, trans. Jeffrey Seitzer (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008), 243. 54 Cf. Antonio Cerella, ‘Religion and Political Form: Carl Schmitt’s Genealogy of Politics as Critique of Jürgen Habermas’s Post­secular Discourse’. Review of International Studies 38 (2012): 975–94. 55 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters of the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 36. 56 Ibid., 2. 57 Carl Schmitt, ‘The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations’, in Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 85, 87. 58 Schmitt, Political Theology, 46. 59 Schmitt, ‘The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations’, 90. 60 Ibid., 94. 61 Carl Schmitt, Staat, Bewegung, Volk: Die Dreigliederung der politischen Einheit (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1933), 12. 62 Carl Schmitt, Glossarium: Aufzeichnungen der Jahre 1947–1951 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1991), 31–32. 63 Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 48. 64 Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 109. 65 See Martin Heidegger, What Is It Called Thinking? trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 16: ‘Man speaks by being silent’. But similar considerations can also be found in Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 208: ‘Keeping silent is another essential possibility of discourse, and it has the same existential foundation’. Also Heidegger, ‘The Origins of the Work of Art’, in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 101: ‘By virtue of . . . reliability the peasant woman is made privy to the silent call of the earth’; and Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in Basic Writings, 245: ‘Language withdraws from man its simple and high speech. But its primal call does not thereby become incapable of speech; it merely falls silent. Man, though, fails to heed this silence’. For a critical discussion, see Berel Lang, Heidegger’s Silence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). 66 Heidegger, Being and Time, 442. 67 Karl Löwith, My Life in Germany before and after 1933. A Report, trans. Elizabeth King (London: Athlone Press, 1994), 60. For a critical discussion, see Charles Guignon,



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‘History and Commitment in the Early Heidegger’, in Heidegger: A Critical Reader, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Harrison Hall (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992), 130–42. 68 Martin Heidegger, ‘Sein und Zeit’, in Gesamtausgabe. Abteilung: Veröffentlichte Schriften 1914–1970. Band 2, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977), 518–19. 69 Heidegger, Being and Time, cit., 428, emphasis in original. 70 Ibid., 432–33. 71 Ibid., 434. 72 For reasons of consistency and clarity, I follow Thomas Sheehan’s suggestion to translate the tree terms ‘Dasein’, ‘Da-sein’ and ‘Existenz’ ‘as “ex-sistence”, hyphenated to stress its etymology. In each of these three terms Heidegger would have us hear the Latin ex + sistere, where the “ex” or “out-and-beyond” dimension of human being forms an openness or clearing that he called “the Da” ’. Cf. Thomas Sheehan, Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift (London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), xvi. 73 Heidegger, Being and Time, 439, my emphasis. 74 Sheehan, Making Sense of Heidegger, 168. 75 Ibid., 169. 76 ‘Temporalizing does not signify that ecstases come in a “succession”. The future is not later than having been, and having been is not earlier than the Present. Temporality temporalizes itself as a future which makes present in the process of having been’. Heidegger, Being and Time, 401. 77 Cf. Guignon, ‘History and Commitment in the Early Heidegger’, 135. 78 William J. Richardson has emphasized the crucial difference between existential and existentiell, between the fundamental ontological structure and that of Dasein’s existence. Cf. William J. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 49–58. See also Sheehan, Making Sense of Heidegger, 136–39. 79 Sheehan, Making Sense of Heidegger, 173, my emphasis. 80 Heidegger, Being and Time, 431–32. 81 Ibid., 443. 82 See Sheehan, Making Sense of Heidegger, 181–82. 83 Heidegger, Being and Time, 444, 446. 84 Cf. also Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), 173. 85 ‘Even historiological disclosure temporalizes itself in terms of the future’. Heidegger, Being and Time, 447. 86 Ibid., 388. 87 Ibid., 437, my emphasis. 88 Löwith, My Life in Germany, 37. The emptiness of the ‘protreptic’ character of Heidegger’s Being and Time is well summarized by a joke invented by one of his students and reported by Löwith: ‘I am resolved, only toward what I don’t know’. 89 Ibid., 38. 90 Ibid., 43. 91 More than a decade after the publication of Being and Time, Heidegger still writes: ‘The unique, the rare, the simple – in short, greatness in history – is never

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self-evident and hence remains incapable of explanation. It is not that historical research denies, greatness in history; rather, it explains it as the exception. In such explanation the great is measured against the ordinary and average’. Cf. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, in Off the Beaten Tracks, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 63. 92 It is interesting to note that, despite the reciprocal influences, these authors are largely silent about one another’s work. Foucault, for instance, referred to Heidegger as ‘the essential philosopher’ and admitted that his ‘whole philosophical development was determined’ by his reading of Heidegger. Yet he never explicitly engaged with the work of the philosopher of Meßkirch. Heidegger, in turn, sought the intellectual and political backing of Schmitt, who, however, never felt comfortable with ‘Heidegger’s ontologization’, although he borrowed a few ideas from Heidegger’s work (e.g., the ‘spatiality of the world’ and the critique of ‘values’). On the influence of Heidegger on Foucault, see Hubert L. Dreyfus and Harrison Hall, ‘Introduction’, in Heidegger: A Critical Reader, 1. See also Hubert L. Dreyfus, ‘On the Ordering of Things: Being and Power in Heidegger and Foucault’, The Southern Journal of Philosophy 28, no. S1 (1989): 83–96. On the Heidegger/Schmitt relation, see Reinhard Mehring, Carl Schmitt. A Biography (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), 249–51. See also Heidegger’s letter to Schmitt of 22 August 1933, published as ‘Heidegger and Schmitt: The Bottom Line’, Telos 72 (20 June 1987): 132. 93 Ivan Illich, Celebrations of Awareness: A Call for Institutional Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), 45, my emphasis. 94 This is precisely the aim of El Muro de la Memoria (The Wall of Memory), which seeks to reconstruct not only the history but also the faces of the Chilean desaparecidos. Through the testimonies, the remains and the voices of those who witnessed the forced disappearances, the wall has ‘opened’ a space for and within the collective memory to which all witnesses, with their voices, can help to fill the silence, the void of meaning created by the Pinochet regime. See http://www.desaparecidos.org/ arg/victimas/muro2.html. 95 Illich, H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness, 8. 96 Max Picard, The Human Face, trans. Guy Endore (London: Cassell, 1931), 4.

Chapter 6

Heidegger on Willpower and the Mood of Modernity Erik Ringmar

In the latter half of the nineteenth-century societies in Europe and North America changed in dramatic ways. Leaving their previous lives in the countryside, some 80 per cent of Europe’s population moved – either to cities to find work or overseas, to the United States in particular.1 In the cities former farmhands and milkmaids worked for a wage, by a machine, at the pace set by foremen and factory clocks, and they lived in tenement houses, thrown together with other migrants with whom they had little in common except their confusion. Not surprisingly, the migrants were often overwhelmed by the sheer pace of city life, by the impressions and the noise, and everyone was under far more stress than previously. In modern society we are compelled to make something out of ourselves and to perform successfully on terms determined not by custom but by the unpredictable relations between supply and demand. This is the modern way of being-in-the-world.2 Conservative thinkers were uniformly critical of these changes. They did not like the upheaval and the commotion; they objected to the speed of the railroads, the soot of the factories, to the power of the market and what it did to social relations and to the souls of the workers. There was a widespread sense that the social pyramid was about to topple, that new social classes would take power and that utter chaos would ensue. At the same time it was far from clear what to do about the situation. Many conservatives looked back, wistfully, at the world they had lost, whereas others presented radical schemes for a political renewal. The thought of Martin Heidegger displayed exactly this unstable mixture of nostalgia and political activism.3 His conservatism was in many ways very endearing and it has continued to win him supporters among people – such as environmentalists and left-wing critics of capitalism – who do not share his outlook on life.4 Heidegger’s is a philosophy of peasants toiling in the fields, of youngsters singing as they walk 137

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through the forest, of mothers peeling potatoes for dinner, of church bells chiming in the distance on warm summer evenings.5 And yet there is also Heidegger, the radical activist – the member of the Nazi party, the philosopher of the Führerprinzip, the anti-Semite and the advocate, in 1934, of the ‘annihilation’ of all ‘internal enemies’ of the German people.6 This unstable mix of nostalgia and radicalism was never more obvious than in relation to Heidegger’s discussion of the will. The problem of the will is a central concern of his philosophy, yet he dealt with it entirely differently at different stages of his life.7 In Being and Time (1927) he had next to nothing to say about the will, and it appears only as a footnote to his discussion of Sorge, or care. Human beings are too deeply enmeshed in the world, he argued, to assert themselves against others and stand up against the conditions under which they live. Likewise, in his late, post-1945, thought he advocated an attitude of Gelassenheit, a stance of live-and-let-live inactivism. However, between the early and the late Heidegger, in the middle of the 1930s, we find Heidegger the radical activist and for him will, willpower and self-assertion were key terms. During this period, he insisted that ordinary people should subject themselves to the will of the German Volk as interpreted and expressed by its Führer. Heidegger wrote next to nothing about international politics and his being-in-the-world has nothing to do with the kinds of beings a student of international politics might study.8 Yet the problem of the will has direct implications for political action and thereby for international politics. As we are about to discover, the question of will and willpower was widely discussed in the first decades of the twentieth century. Willpower, at the time, was associated with self-assertive action, for example on the battlefield or in colonial settings; self-assertion was a matter of making it in a Darwinian struggle between nations and races for Lebensraum and hegemony.9 It was to this political discussion that Heidegger made a contribution, no matter how philosophical. This is also where Heidegger’s writings become relevant to students of international politics. By following Heidegger’s intellectual trajectory, we will suggest in conclusion, we can better understand the role of willpower and self-assertion in international politics. HEIDEGGER, THE SOCIOLOGIST Heidegger was no sociologist and he explicitly shunned sociological language, yet his philosophy developed in close interaction with the themes discussed by social observers of his day, a proximity often concealed by the technical vocabulary he uses. Consider, to begin with, Heidegger’s sharp, if never explicitly argued for, distinction between modern and pre-modern



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societies, reminiscent of similar distinctions made inter alia by Ferdinand Tönnies and Émile Durkheim.10 According to Heidegger, a defining feature of people in traditional, agricultural, society was their feeling of being perfectly at home in their world. To be at home means more than anything that we know in advance what we are going to encounter and what we need to do. At home life is familiar and we deal with the environment by means of wellestablished habits and well-honed skills.11 We are at one with a situation into which we fit both comfortably and comfortingly. Life in modern society, according to Heidegger-the-sociologist, does not work this way. In modern society we are not at home, we do not fit comfortably into situations, and we cannot relax. Instead of being at one with the world, the world is set before us in the form of a Bild, a picture.12 The world is gestellt, ‘enframed’, as it were, and instead of simply living our life, we reflect on it. That which should be immediately present is represented. As a result we are alienated from the situations in which we find ourselves, and instead of relying on habits and well-honed skills, we come to rely on explicit procedures – of which technology provides the best example. In a speech which Heidegger gave in 1961 on the occasion of the 700th anniversary of the founding of his native town of Meßkirch, he provided an example of this process at work. When he looked around at the rooftops of the houses in the town what he saw were endless rows of TV antennas. ‘What do these signs point to?’, he asked. They point out that men are precisely no longer at home in those places where, from the outside, they seem to ‘dwell.’ Rather, by the day and the hour people are being pulled away into strange, enticing, exciting, at times also entertaining and educational realms. These realms, to be sure, offer no abiding, reliable resting-place; they change unceasingly from the new to the newest. Captivated and absorbed by all this, man ‘moves out’ as it were.13

When the world stands before us as a picture on a TV screen, we are bound to be absorbed by it and as a result we lose contact with our familiar surroundings. Heidegger called this an unheimlich condition, usually translated as ‘uncanny’ but better understood as the ‘un-home-like’.14 In a world where everything is gestellt before us, he insists, we are not at home anywhere, not even at home. In an un-home-like world we can find no place to rest; our well-established habits no longer apply and our well-honed skills have become redundant. Instead we have to make explicit sense of everything we encounter. The result is a particular, modern, mood. Heidegger talked about the Grundstimmungen, ‘fundamental moods’, of life in modern society, and he gave two examples – anxiety and boredom. People in modern society are anxious first of all.15 We are anxious since there is no place to which we

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necessarily belong and no life which necessarily is ours. Too many options are available to us, and since we have no firm basis on which to make a choice between them, we have no idea how to live. Moreover, the unpredictability of life means that our future necessarily is uncertain. The risks are high; we never know what will come towards us or what we might be forced to do. And we are bored for much the same reasons.16 Separated from a life which once was ours, we are never satisfied with what we manage to attain. In modern society we are constantly on the lookout for things that can excite us, and once we have tried the new, we want the new new: ‘The mystery is lacking in our Dasein, and thereby the inner terror that every mystery carried with it and that gives Dasein its greatness remains absent. The absence of oppressiveness is what fundamentally oppresses and leaves us most profoundly empty, i.e. the fundamental emptiness that bores us’.17 Compare life in a traditional society where no one was anxious and few people were bored. People in traditional society were not anxious since they felt at home in their world and they were not bored since comparatively few tasks, and little of their time, required their conscious attention. In order to escape both anxiety and boredom people in modern society take refuge in crowds. By imitating what others do we are no longer required to make our own decisions. Even if the future is full of uncertainty and risk, at least we confront it together. In this way the normalcy of the world is restored and the crowd becomes a sort of substitute home, a temporary location much like a shelter for the homeless. In addition, the crowd helps us keep our boredom at bay. When we are together with others, after all, it is far easier to be distracted than when we are alone; we gossip about things, make jokes, spend and kill time together: ‘We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as they judge; likewise we shrink back from the ‘great mass’ as they shrink back; we find ‘shocking’ what they find shocking’.18 The problem is only that this makes for a perfectly inauthentic life. People in modern society live the life of a generic member of the indistinct multitude; we are an anonymous face in a crowd, a piece of statistics, an unknown soldier in an unmarked grave. In modern society we are always hanging with das Man, as it were, with ‘the they’ or ‘the one’, despite the fact that – or rather because – we know that there is no being-there there. HEIDEGGER, THE PHILOSOPHER This sociologizing version of Heidegger’s philosophy makes it clear how close he was to the concerns of his contemporaries, but Heidegger was no sociologist and to treat him as such is obviously unfair. In order to take him seriously, we must turn him back into a philosopher. A first step is to consider



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the role which moods played in his analysis. A comparison with the methods employed by Edmund Husserl, Heidegger’s teacher, is helpful in this regard. Husserl sought to reach philosophical insights by means of what he called a ‘phenomenological reduction’, a form of reflection that aimed at stripping away the psychological features and empirical facts that influence our everyday understanding of the world.19 Husserl’s question was not ‘are you in pain?’ but ‘does pain have a temporal dimension?’; not ‘why did you do that?’ but ‘does action have cognitive antecedents?’ These, according to Husserl, are scientific questions, but scientific questions which only can be settled by means of an investigation of subjective experiences. Yet as Heidegger saw it, phenomenological reduction was a too reflective, too detached, methodology and as a result it was always going to transform and thereby distort the experiences under investigation.20 Heidegger’s investigation of the phenomenology of moods was intended to provide a more engaged, more immediate, and thereby more convincing method. But just as in the case of Husserl, the aim was to draw conclusions regarding matters of ontology, not psychological facts. Heidegger is not interested in how people feel but in what moods can tell us about Being.21 But what does Heidegger mean by Stimmungen? In our everyday terminology of affect, ‘mood’ is often used interchangeably with ‘emotion’ and ‘feeling’. We feel a certain way, we say, meaning that we have certain emotions or that we are in a certain mood. And yet, speaking more circumspectly, we should distinguish between these uses.22 Basically, emotions have a cognitive content whereas moods do not. Emotions are about something or someone whereas moods concern a general attitude or stance. Yet, curiously, moods are not affective states that we have as much as affective states that we experience and go through. We find ourselves in a certain mood, we say, implying that the mood precedes our explicit recognition of it. Or rather, a mood concerns the interaction between a person and the situation in which she finds herself. In fact, situations can have moods too, denoting their ‘atmosphere’.23 Thus a restaurant may have a ‘cosy’ mood, an Italian seaside town a ‘romantic’ mood, a meeting a ‘constructive’ mood and so on. Moods can often be interpreted already from a person’s posture, gait or general demeanour. A bored person rests her head in her hands, she is slumped on a sofa in a limp and listless position and a depressed person is often literally pressed down by life.24 Since the body always has a certain posture, we must always be in a certain mood. There can be no mood-less engagement with the world just as there can be no body-less engagement.25 We see the world through the mood. Yet, since it is the mood that makes seeing possible, the mood itself becomes opaque; just as the eye, a mood is not itself available for inspection.26 Our bodies are in a mood before we are; or perhaps better: we are in our bodies before we are fully present to our conscious selves.

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Slightly differently put, we can see a mood as a question of attunement:27 that is a question of whether, and how, we fit into the situation in which we find ourselves. In fact, stimmen, ‘to tune’, is a cognate of Stimmung, and to tune an instrument is to adjust its pitch to other instruments or its strings to each other. Likewise, when somebody asks us how we feel, we tell them – ‘I feel rootless’, we say, ‘worried’, ‘hopeful’, ‘pensive’ or ‘over the moon’.28 These answers provide a report on the state of our attunement, that is a report on the mood in which we find ourselves. But Stimmung in German can also mean ‘voice’, and it is possible to think of the process of attunement as an interaction between a call and a response. The situation is calling out to us, as it were, and we respond to it.29 Whether and how we respond determines how we fit into the situation. Take the homelessness that Heidegger discussed in the address to the people of Meßkirch. Although they seemed to enjoy themselves well enough in front of their respective TV sets, Heidegger suspected that they secretly were profoundly bored, and it is in profound boredom that he discovers a feeling of Heimweh, ‘homesickness’.30 The home we have lost is calling out to us, as it were, calling us to come home.31 Thus understood all moods imply a particular way of paying attention.32 From the Latin ad- meaning ‘to’ and tendere meaning ‘to stretch’, to attend to something is ‘to give heed to’ or ‘to direct one’s mind or energies towards’ something. Depending on the mood we are in, we will pay attention in a certain fashion, more or less intently, carefully, and with more or less interest and degree of absorption. Yet as we all know, paying proper attention to something is difficult under the best of circumstances and often we cannot do it for more than a few seconds at a time. In order to help us here, we need the presence of a Gestalt of some kind, that is the presence of a pattern, a figure or some overall structure.33 Paying attention becomes a lot easier if we can grasp the Gestalt as a whole while its individual components gradually come to be revealed. We pay attention since we want to see, hear or feel what is about to happen; since we want to know how the story, the piece of music or the film, is going to end. We are entrained, as it were; meaning that we are ‘captured’, ‘held’ and ‘carried along’ by that which is unfolding. Sustained attention requires entrainment. A mood is where we find ourselves, we said, but it is in extreme, depersonalizing, moods that we find Being. In everyday moods, that is, Being is concealed by all kinds of social facts and psychological baggage, but this, according to Heidegger, is not true of anxiety and profound boredom which strip us of all individualizing features. In profound boredom, life is drained of meaning and we are completely unable to engage with the situations in which we find ourselves. It is life itself which drags; life itself is the Langeweile, the ‘long while’, which we cannot fill with any conceivable content. When



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confronting profound boredom time loses its sense of direction and our very identities begin to unravel.34 Something similar happens in the case of anxiety.35 Anxiety does not concern specific objects or persons but describes instead an objectless unease. What we are anxious about is existence as such, and since human life always and necessarily projects itself into the future, what we are anxious about is more than anything what will become of us. ‘[T]hat in the face of which we have anxiety, is thrown Being-in-the-world’.36 Correctly understood, profound boredom and anxiety are not predicaments as much as opportunities; or rather, they are opportunities because they are predicaments.37 When everything else is stripped away, when we are pushed to the brink, it is Being alone that appears. As all moods, profound boredom and anxiety are affective states to which we are called to respond. Being is calling out to us, as it were, and provided we can come up with an answer, attunement should be possible also under these extreme circumstances. Indeed, to attune oneself to Being is to live an authentic life and thereby the most important of all the tasks we might set ourselves.38 The problem is only that Being is so devilishly difficult to pay attention to.39 Take profound boredom. If you are profoundly bored, the world has no overall form; there is no Gestalt which can capture, hold us and carry us along, and as a result entrainment fails.40 The problem posed by anxiety is quite different but the result is much the same. In anxiety there are plenty of Gestalts to be sure – there is much that potentially could capture our attention – but we are too restless to let our selves be held by any of them. Our attention span is contracted to close to zero and we will not let our selves be captured and carried along. Flitting from one thing to the other, our heads eventually start spinning and we are unable to pay attention to anything at all. The reason why Being is so difficult to pay attention to is that it has no Gestalt. The outrageous fact that we are alive is not itself an observable datum; Being is not an object and it does not look, sound or smell like anything. As a result it is never clear what we are supposed to pay attention to. Since Being has no Gestalt it cannot grab us, hold us and carry us along. Instead we are more likely to be overwhelmed by the encounter. When coming into the presence of Being, we become what Heidegger calls gebannt, ‘entranced’ – a state of awe in which our minds freeze, our knees go weak and we lose our faculty of speech.41 This is a predicament similar to what Edmund Burke referred to as an experience of the ‘sublime’, an affective state in which our mind ‘is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it’.42 We are quite clearly in dire straits. Here we are, in an extreme mood, where we can hear the call of Being, but not very distinctly and not for very long, yet we have no means of properly responding to it. We seem to be failing in the

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most basic, and most important, obligation of our lives. Not surprisingly, we are prepared to do just about anything to try to escape the situation. And this, says Heidegger, is exactly what happens. Dasein flees; it flees ‘in the face of itself and in the face of its authenticity’.43 THE PROBLEM OF THE WILL Although he reached this juncture by means of a philosophical and not a sociological route, Heidegger’s description of life in modern society is strikingly similar to the descriptions provided by many of his contemporaries. As they agreed, modern society was a problem, and at the turn of the twentieth century this was often discussed as a problem of the will.44 Modern society has deprived people of the power to control their own lives, philosophers and sociologists but also medical professionals, newspaper editors and writers of self-help books agreed. Life in modern society is ruled by machines and routines; people are parts of organizations and institutions and everywhere they find themselves as the anonymous members of faceless crowds. As a result, people have become emasculated and irresolute; they are suffering from a maladie de la volonté, a will that is weak or which in some pathological cases may be entirely missing.45 The obvious remedy was to help people ‘restore’ or ‘strengthen’ their will; they had to learn to take charge of and assert themselves. Advice on how this could be done varied from one author to the next but many stressed the importance of the sufferers first taking charge of their bodies.46 This could, for example, be done by means of physical exercise. Compare the turn-of-the-century boom in callisthenics, Swedish gymnastics, nudism, yoga and physical fitness regimes of all kinds; or compare the interest in vegetarianism and other specialized diets.47 A second step was to learn how to assert oneself. Acts of the will are sovereign acts, theorists of the will explained; they are creative expressions of the imagination; and as such they allow people to escape the confines within which life in modern society has placed them.48 In order to exercise one’s will, the sufferers to learn how to impose themselves on their surroundings, on nature or on other people. This was when the works of Friedrich Nietzsche began to be read by large numbers of people.49 Indeed, after the year 1900 something of a Nietzsche cult began spreading across Europe. Nietzsche had famously nothing but scorn for the ‘herd instinct’ of the crowd and he was disgusted by all the signs of weakness and sickness he saw around him.50 The remedy he prescribed was a powerful one, and it became more powerful still in texts such as Wille zur Macht, 1901, in which his posthumous notes were selectively compiled.51



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In a world in which God is dead, there are no absolutes, Nietzsche declared, and instead we have to create our own values, our own personalities and meaning. We do this as we discipline our will and impose it, with as much force as possible, on ourselves, on the world and on other people. Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into unexplored seas! Live in war with your equals and with yourselves! Be robbers and spoilers, ye knowing ones, as long as ye cannot be rulers and possessors! The time will soon pass when you can be satisfied to live like timorous deer concealed in the forest. Knowledge will finally stretch out her hand for that which belongs to her: she means to rule and possess, and you with her!52

Exactly what Nietzsche meant by this militant language is admittedly not quite clear, but there is no doubt that at least some of his followers interpreted it as an exhortation to engage in physical violence. Some went to Africa and other extra-European locations in order to exercise their will on the natives – and German imperialism was particularly genocidal.53 When war arrived in 1914, next to all Europeans had a chance to assert themselves. Or rather, while the vast majority of Europeans were rather reluctant to go to war, there were plenty of people – intellectuals and city-dwellers foremost among them – who marched off to their respective battlefronts with great enthusiasm.54 The young men who eventually were to be gassed in the trenches set off hoping for a life of heroic glory, and at least some of them carried copies of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra in their knapsacks.55 As far Germany was concerned, the perceived need for self-assertion was not diminished by the outcome of the war. The Germans had been weak-willed and divided, Adolf Hitler insisted, and that was why they had been defeated, but under the guidance of the National Socialists they were once and for all going to assert themselves. In the Second World War, Germany’s willpower was exercised on a panEuropean level, and once again the name of Nietzsche was invoked in the bellicose propaganda.56 THE WILL IN BEING AND TIME Given this historical background, it surprising to discover that the will plays next to no role in Heidegger’s Being and Time.57 Although Heidegger’s analysis of the modern predicament was strikingly similar to that of his contemporaries, he does not follow them in providing prescriptions for how the will can be strengthened and the self-asserted. Indeed, his silence on this topic is as striking a statement as any other in the book. Consider, for example, his discussion of Entschlossenheit, ‘resoluteness’.58 This, if anything, would seem to be a Nietzschean theme. Willing, as Nietzsche had explained, is a matter of

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ekstasis, of finding oneself beyond oneself; of incorporating the other into the self.59 When we act resolutely, we respond to the call of Being, whether we can properly hear it or not; that is we act by fiat, by a sovereign act of the will. To be resolute is to be decisive, to take charge of oneself, to be self-assertive, and so on. If Heidegger’s resoluteness is the same as a Nietzschean Wille zur Macht, there is no difference in their treatment of the will.60 But Heidegger does not have access to this argument. The resoluteness he advocated in Being and Time was not a Nietzschean project, at least not a Nietzschean project as commonly understood.61 The reason is that Heidegger’s philosophy contained no notion of an individual subject which could define itself apart form, and in opposition to, society and thereby impose itself on other people and the world. Heidegger’s Dasein is enmeshed with the social right from the start; Dasein‘s world is always a Mitwelt, a ‘withworld’, and always a ‘Being-with Others’.62 Inextricably bound to the fate of others, man has already subjected himself to ways of living, speaking, and understanding which are not his own. It is true of course that Heidegger often talked about sociability as a problem, such as when Dasein decides to hang out with das Man and comes to live an inauthentic life, but he never believed there was an alternative. Sociability is an intrinsic part of human nature; it constitutes who we are and is not an added extra. Sociability is simultaneously what makes us human and what makes us inauthentic. The problem of authenticity is the problem of how to make a life for ourselves in the face of these conflicting facts. This is why Heidegger has next to nothing to say about the will in Being and Time. He discussed the will only briefly and under the rubric of Sorge, or ‘care’.63 The will, at this stage in the development of his thought, is neither a ‘faculty’ nor a ‘power’ properly speaking, and it is only when in a mood and as attuned that something like a will can come into existence. In terms of the language we used above we can think of this as a question of attention. To attend to something is to care about something; we are engaged, as it were, and this engagement is, in Being and Time, what Heidegger understands as a will of sorts.64 But this also means that the will necessarily is set by, and thereby limited by, the mood in which we find ourselves.65 The mood comes first and it cannot be altered by acts of the will, but neither can it be altered by politics or by philosophizing; all we can do is to attune ourselves to a mood or to remain at odds with it.66 Finding our selves in a mood, we find our will there too and the will can for that reason never be understood as anything like a sovereign power. Whatever ‘resoluteness’ might mean under these circumstances, it cannot refer to anything like a Nietzschean project of self-creation. Perhaps we should have taken the etymology of the word Entschlossenheit more seriously. The root here is schließen, to ‘close’ or ‘conclude’, and perhaps Entschlossenheit is best understood as something like a verdict that



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one passes on oneself. Resolution is not a matter of imposing ourselves on the world as much as of coming to a judgment regarding who we are and what kind of a life we can live.67 Ironically, this understanding of resoluteness might not have taken us further away from Nietzsche but instead closer to him. Clearly, the violent interpretation of the thesis regarding Wille zur Macht is not the only one possible.68 What Nietzsche had in mind was arguably not acts of sovereign self-determination as much as a determination to, as he put it, ‘become who we are’. Amor fati, love your fate, is the phrase Nietzsche repeatedly uses, implying that we must learn to embrace the life that has been given to us and to consciously will it. In this context, Wille zur Macht is more than anything a matter of a painstaking process of ‘characterbuilding’.69 You learn to love your fate by learning to become who you are, that is by developing the kinds of habits that allow you to fit comfortably into one of the possible lives which is at your disposal. THE WILL OF THE FÜHRER But this was not Heidegger’s final word on the topic of the will. Conservative thinkers, we said, were uniformly critical of the changes wrought by modern society. They did not like the upheaval and the commotion; they were afraid that the social pyramid was about to topple and that chaos would ensue. Yet it was far from clear what they could do about the situation. Some conservatives looked back, wistfully, at the world they had lost whereas others presented radical schemes for a political renewal.70 This unstable mixture of nostalgia and radicalism was never more obvious than in Heidegger’s discussion of the will. His begrudging references in Being and Time presents the traditional conservative case. Conservative thinkers after all had always been sceptical of the rhetoric of willpower.71 They did not like the idea of self-assertion, which to their ears smacked of self-indulgence, wilfulness and social disruption. Conservative thinkers would much have preferred people to stay in their designated places and to live according to their time-honoured habits. Yet in a rapidly changing society, there are no such places and no such habits, and here conservatives too might easily turn into radicals. This, in the 1930s, was the case with Martin Heidegger.72 The problem with modern society, we quoted him as saying, is the way the world is gestellt before us, and the instrumental attitude we adopt to nature, to other human beings and to ourselves. Behind these concerns, Heidegger found the problem of the forgetting of the question of Being. In modern society we always ask what things are, how they work and where they come from, but we no longer ask what it means to be. For political action to make a true difference, it must make it possible for the question of Being to once again

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be raised. It was, Heidegger came to believe in the 1930s, up to the German people, the Volk, to make this happen. Or rather, the German Volk was going to do so as led by its leaders, its Führer, who in Heidegger’s mind included its leading politician, Adolf Hitler, and its leading Dichter und Denker, the nineteenth-century poet Friedrich Hölderlin and Heidegger himself. This is an extraordinary vision, if there ever was one, both in its audacity and its pretensions.73 Heidegger seems to have believed that the Nazis could be used as a vehicle for promoting his philosophy and that he with their help could establish himself as a sort of philosopher-guardian of the country as a whole. And even more outrageously, he believed that the German people in this way would be able to radically alter the modern way of being-in-the-world; that the Germans as led by the Nazis would help him to once again raise the question of Being.74 Before these changes could take place, however, the philosophical obstacles erected in Being and Time had to be removed. The problem, we saw above, was that Heidegger’s conceptualization of the will left little place for sovereign, self-assertive, action. He found the will in moods but moods can be altered neither by means of philosophy nor by politics. Yet, as Heidegger came to point out in the 1930s, the fundamental moods, the Grundstimmungen, of an era varies radically from one historical period to the next.75 Grundstimmungen have a history which corresponds to the various ways in which human beings have paid heed to the call of Being over time. Yet the subject of this history is not the individual Dasein as much as the Dasein of a Volk. We attune ourselves together with other people who share our way of life. This is how Heidegger came to introduce the polis, the state, into his philosophy. While a Volk is a spiritual entity, or perhaps an imagined community, it is in the polis that the Volk takes concrete shape.76 It is the polis which is attuned to the Grundstimmungen of the age and individual citizens in turn are attuned to the Stimmungen of the polis. Here Heidegger invoked the metaphor of the Fuge, referring to a musical composition, such as the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach, to which all members of the polis had to einfügen their individual voices. Or, in an alternative etymology in which Fuge refers to a ‘joint’ such as the joints that connect different pieces of wood or brickwork, our task is to zusammenfügen ourselves in a fügsam manner as composite parts of the same political construction.77 The advantage of this new, alternative, language over the metaphor of a mood is that it now becomes possible to overturn the entire structure in relation to which we are situated. Instead of making our bodies fit into an illusive and all-pervading atmosphere, we have the option of turning our backs on the polis and its demands for conformity. It is in this connection that Heidegger discusses Sophocles’ Antigone who buried her brother outside of the citywalls of Thebes in defiance of the decisions of its rulers.78 Antigone refused



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to einfügen herself, as it were, and became effectively stateless, or apolis. This is a theme to which Heidegger repeatedly returned in his writings of the 1930s. Or as the reliably unfüglich Friedrich Nietzsche explained: ‘one must do as the traveller who wants to know the height of the towers of a city: for that purpose he leaves the city. Thoughts concerning moral prejudices, if they are not to be prejudiced concerning prejudices, presuppose a position outside of morality, some sort of world beyond good and evil, to which one must ascend, climb, or fly’.79 Yet clearly such ascending, climbing or flying is not for everyone. You need to be a person of exceptional strength, someone uniquely audacious and forceful, in order to break free of the conventions of your society. Ordinary people, the füglich ones, will never understand such actions and will necessarily label them as immoral.80 Ascending, climbing and flying, Heidegger explains, is for the Führer: ‘Preeminent in the site of history, they become at the same time apolis, without city and abode, lonesome, uncanny, among beings as a whole but with no way out, at the same time without ordinance and limit, without structure and fit, because they as creators must first ground all this’.81 The new foundation that they establish will be the basis for a new set of conventions, a new morality, which retroactively, will justify their actions.82 Here Nietzsche’s notion of self-creation seems to have made a spectacular return. Triumph des Willens indeed. Yet even in Heidegger’s thought of the 1930s, moods cannot be altered by assertive action alone and neither philosophy nor politics is sufficient to the task. Instead, as he came to argue, the powers of creation belong to Chaos.83 Beneath the ground on which the polis is founded, there is an Abgrund, an abyss. Obviously an abyss is a flimsy foundation on which to establish a political order and it would seem to be entirely arbitrary too since it is difficult to justify as anything other than a stopgap convention. Yet Chaos should not be understood as a confusing nothingness but instead as a creative force. What Heidegger had in mind was Chaos as described in Hesiod’s Theogony, the creation myth most commonly told amount the ancient Greeks.84 Chaos, to Hesiod, was a sort of fertile chasm from which things could emerge: first the division between earth and sky, then gods and humans, and then everything else.85 If the powers of creation remained with Chaos, there are inevitably limits to what human beings can do, and these limits applied even to the most audacious of poets, thinkers and political leaders. Instead of willing a certain future into existence, we can only take a leap into the unknown – Heidegger talks about a Sprung – and to hope for the best. Exactly what emerges from this audacious act we will never know beforehand but as a result the world will have been made anew and the Grundstimmungen of our time will have changed. In 1933, Heidegger identified Adolf Hitler as that Springer.86

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HEIDEGGER, THE WORK-OUT INSTRUCTOR This bid for power failed of course. The Nazis were not particularly attentive students of Heidegger’s philosophy and to the extent that they needed an abstract justification for their all too concrete crimes there were far more simple-minded thinkers to whom they could turn.87 Heidegger resigned from the rectorship of the University of Freiburg in April 1934 and although he appears to have continued to sympathize with the Nazi cause, he was no longer an active member of the party.88 In the latter part of the 1930s, in lecture courses on Nietzsche and Hölderlin, he gradually distanced himself from the rhetoric of willpower, and after the Second World War, desperate to rehabilitate himself, he identified willpower and self-assertion as key problems of the modern age.89 Although he never repudiated what he in Introduction to Metaphysics, 1935, referred to as ‘the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism’, he came to regard politics as part of the problem and not a part of the solution.90 The will to will, he now explained, was an inevitable consequences of a modern world in which everything is gestellt before us. The Holocaust, from this point of view, was only one more example of this modern, instrumental, attitude to life.91 The task, from this post-Hitlerian point of view, is how to make people stop treating the world, and themselves, exploitatively, that is how to convince people to stop willing and stop asserting themselves. Heidegger, in his later philosophy, found the answer in the notion of Gelassenheit.92 Lassen in German means to ‘let’, ‘make’ or ‘allow’ something to happen, and Gelassenheit is translated as ‘composure’ or ‘equanimity’, and has by Heidegger’s translators been rendered as ‘releasement’, as an attitude, that is, of letting things be, to live and let live. Such Stoicism has always been common among conservatives who insist that ‘even if everyone else is going crazy, at least we must remain calm’, and it seems to have returned Heidegger to the stance he held regarding the will in Being and Time. As a result, his later thought has often been criticized as defeatist.93 This, however, is not quite fair. His point is not that we should cultivate our gardens but instead that we should attune ourselves to the world in a particular fashion. Gelassenheit, Heidegger argued, requires attentiveness, alertness, even vigilance.94 This is different from passivity, which implies disinterest and inattention, but it is also different from wilful self-assertion. Consider the respective bodily postures involved.95 While the passive person is leaning backwards, muscles inert, perhaps half asleep, the assertive person is leaning forward, looking for pretexts, ready to pounce. An attentive person, in contrast to both these postures, has rendered herself to the situation much as Vladimir and Estragon rendered themselves to their situation in their rendez-vous with Godot.96 We



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are standing up straight, keeping our eyes on the horizon like a lookout on the mast of a ship or a watchman in a tower. But what are we waiting for? A sign perhaps, or maybe an instruction or a call, no doubt from Being itself – and it is only by paying proper attention that we are prepared to respond to that call when it comes. We have, as Heidegger explained, to make ourselves ‘ready for the readiness of holding oneself open for the arrival, or for the absence of a god’.97 Here Heidegger is running up against the same difficulty as before. That is if Gelassenheit is a way of attuning ourselves to the situation in which we find ourselves, then Gelassenheit is a mood. But if moods are the precognitive preconditions for thought, philosophy cannot influence them and neither can politics. And if this is the case then no calls for attentiveness and vigilance, no matter how sternly expressed, are going to be effective. This is not least the case since Gelassenheit contrasts sharply with the predominant mood of modern society which is more likely to induce inattentiveness and distraction. So what can we do? Rather uncharacteristically, Heidegger equivocates. He intimates that philosophy indeed can help us, but that surely cannot be right.98 Later he opts for poetry and arts.99 He also gets himself involved in Zen-like riddles like the exhortation ‘to will not to will’: ‘Nonwilling in this sense means: to will-fully renounce willing. And then, on the other hand, the expression non-willing also means: that which does not at all pertain to the will’.100 At this juncture, let us suggest, philosophy can no longer guide us.101 Thinking can only get us so far and it has taken Heidegger as far as he can go. Yet as Nietzsche was fond of pointing out, beyond philosophy there is physiology and beyond Heidegger’s thought there is the body.102 Heidegger’s own discussion of the body is famously unsatisfactory but subsequent contributions to phenomenological analysis, such as that of Maurice MerleauPonty, has done much to improve on this state of affairs.103 So has recent work in neurophenomenology.104 Perhaps Heidegger was simply wrong: perhaps there indeed are things we can do in order to change our moods. After all, many moods seem to have physiological causes. Thus a toothache may put us in a grumpy mood while a morning jog can make us confident about the day ahead. In fact, both anecdotal and scientific evidence indicate that moods quite easily can be manipulated by means of drugs or by music or by changes in bodily posture.105 Thus coffee will makes us alert, alcohol will make us carefree, and dancing, singing or marching together will put us in a good mood.106 Yet if this indeed is the case, Heidegger’s discussion of Gelassenheit might provide a solution after all, at least if we read it as a workout manual rather than a philosophical text. The answer is all in the posture he prescribes, in the stretched neck, the vigilant eyes, the watchful wake.107 Although we cannot think our way through the problems of modern society,

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we can position our bodies in relation to them. We take a stance and come to create a mood. In this way we will, little by little, come to feel better. CONCLUSION For students of international politics these conclusions are bound to be disappointing. Clearly Heidegger’s œuvre cannot be mined for ‘lessons’ and there are no ‘implications for further research’ to be found here. And in any case, Heidegger’s thought should surely not be gestellt before us and treated as a resource to be exploited. His writings on politics are confined to the brief period in the 1930s when he hitched his wagon to the Nazi juggernaut, and that, if anything, is a good reason to ignore them.108 And yet, as we have seen, Heidegger’s philosophy touched on many of the themes discussed by social observers of his day – the impact of industrialization and urbanization, and the nature of the self in modern society – and if nothing else this gives his thought a historical interest.109 It exemplifies the instability of the conservative outlook at a time of rapid social and political change. This is particularly the case for Heidegger’s discussion of willpower. International politics is sometimes regarded as a battle of wills.110 Rising powers assert their will by making new demands on their neighbours and established powers reassure others and themselves that they have the will to defend the status quo. During a war, the will of the people is sometimes said to compensate for deficiencies in military hardware and once the will of the people is broken everything is lost. Once defeated, the first obligation of statesmen is to assert the position of their country, that is to impose its will on others. In accounts such as these, the will of the state is often represented as more than the sum of the wills of the individuals who comprise it. To act in accordance with the ‘national will’ is consequently to act on someone else’s instructions. The same is true of terrorist who claim to be carrying out ‘the will of God’ or colonial administrators who regard themselves as agents of ‘the will of History’. The danger of this way of thinking should be obvious to anyone who has studied the history of colonialism or the history of the two, twentieth-century, world wars. Yet as our discussion has shown, this is not an inevitable way of thinking. Although Realpolitik and security dilemmas have a long history, the rhetoric of willpower and self-assertion has a history which only is contemporaneous with the changes brought about by modern society. This rhetoric is highly seductive to be sure but there are also ways to resist it. Heidegger’s thought illustrates both possibilities. The will, Heidegger pointed out, arises only in a mood and as the result of a certain way of paying attention. Human beings are



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social before they are subjects. Inextricably bound to the fate of others, man has already subjected himself to ways of living, speaking, and understanding which are not his own. Surely the same is true to the subjects that populate world affairs. A state can never be defined apart form, and in opposition to, the international society of which it is a member. This will not stop states from asserting themselves to be sure, but with Heidegger we could still hope for a change of moods. World peace will not be brought about by philosophy but it might be brought about by states that adopt a different posture. States too have postures after all. We commonly talk about the ‘aggressive’, ‘neutral’ or ‘forward-leaning’ posture of a state, or of states that are ‘flat on their backs’ or that once again have ‘stood up’.111 Following Heidegger the workout instructor rather than the philosopher, the task would be to replace these postures with a posture of detached vigilance. Gelassenheit, on this account, is how we make peace with the world in which we find ourselves but also with each other. Consider, finally, Heidegger’s discussion of moods.112 International politics is next to always analysed in rationalistic terms. It is discussed as a matter of the preferences and goals that guide policy-makers, or in terms of intentions and interests. Digging deeper, a student of international politics might investigate the psychological processes by means of which policy-makers perceive the world and ask questions about cognitive maps, Weltanschauungen, or perhaps the policy-makers’ relations with their mothers. Other scholars insist that identities are more basic than interests and suggest that we should study the struggles for recognition through which identities come to be constituted. But if Heidegger is right, these are all superficial concerns. All these items of cognition and affect arise only in a mood. The Grundstimmungen come first and everything else comes second. This is surely the case for international politics too. International politics too has moods. The world wars of the twentieth-century were fought in a certain mood, and so was the Cold War and the Global War on Terror. But if this is the case, a new posture is required of students of international politics. We must become more attentive to moods and to the various ways in which states attune themselves to them. NOTES 1 See Hagen Schulze, States, Nations and Nationalism: From the Middle Ages to the Present (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1998), 141. 2 ‘On or about December 1910’, Virgina Woolf notoriously claimed, at least half-seriously, ‘human character changed’. See Virginia Woolf, ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs Brown’, in Woolf, The Captain’s Death and Other Essays (London: Hogarth, 1950), 96. See further Erik Ringmar, ‘The Problem of the Modern Self: Imitation,

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Will Power and the Politics of Character’, International Political Anthropology 9, no. 1 (May 2016): 67–86. 3 For more on the historical context of his thought, see, inter alia, Michael E. Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, and Art (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and Johannes Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 4 See, inter alia, Michael E. Zimmerman, Contesting Earth’s Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 5 For a critique, see Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 40–46. See Adam Sharr, Heidegger’s Hut (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 103–12. 6 Heidegger, Being and Truth, 72–73. The secondary literature on the ‘Heidegger controversy’ is itself enormous. A helpful compilation is Richard Wolin, ed. The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992). See further Victor Farías, Heidegger and Nazism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991); Tom Rockmore and Joseph Margolis, The Heidegger Case: On Philosophy and Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992); Karsten Harries, ‘Heidegger as a Political Thinker’, The Review of Metaphysics 29, no. 4 (June 1976): 642–69; Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933–1935 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); and Gregory Fried, ‘A Letter to Emmanuel Faye’, Philosophy Today 55, no. 3 (2011): 219–52. 7 Although extensive treatments of Heidegger’s view of the will remain rare in the secondary literature, Davis argues that ‘the question of the will . . . is crucially at issue in the various twists and turns of Heidegger’s path of thought from beginning to end’. Cf. Bret Davis, Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), xxiii. 8 See, however, the writings from 1933/1934 collected in Martin Heidegger, Nature, History, State: 1933–1934, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), as well as the speeches Heidegger gave in support of leaving the League of Nations, reprinted in Wolin, The Heidegger Controversy, 40–60. See also Martin Heidegger, ‘Wege zur Aussprache’, in Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 13. Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, ed. Hermann Heidegger (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2002); for a discussion, see Gregory Fried, Heidegger’s Polemos: From Being to Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 179–82. 9 See further Erik Ringmar, War and Willpower (London: Routledge, 2018). 10 Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National Socialism, 68–86. Cf. also Niall Bond, ‘Ferdinand Tönnies’s Romanticism’, The European Legacy 16, no. 4 (1 July 2011): 487–504. 11 Cf. Heidegger’s notion of wohnen, to ‘dwell’ in his ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in Basic Writings, ed. Krell Farrell (New York: Harper & Row, 1997), 319–39.



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12 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World View’, trans. Marjorie Grene, Boundary 2 4, no. 2 (Winter 1976): 341–55. 13 Martin Heidegger, ‘Meßkirch’s Seventh Centennial’, trans. Thomas J. Sheehan, Listening 8 (1973), 43, 45. 14 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 232–33. All references to Heidegger’s works below refer to page numbers, not paragraphs. 15 Ibid., 228–35. 16 Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 78–167. See further Erik Ringmar, ‘Attention and the Cause of Modern Boredom’, in Boredom Studies: Postdisciplinary Inquiries, ed. Michael E. Gardiner and Julian Jason Haladyn (London: Routledge, 2017), 193–202; and Jan Slaby, ‘The Other Side of Existence: Heidegger on Boredom’, in Habitus in Habitat II: Other Sides of Cognition, ed. Sabine Flach and Jan Soeffner (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010). 17 Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 163–64. 18 Heidegger, Being and Time, 164. 19 Dan Zahavi, ‘Phenomenology of Reflection’, in Commentary on Husserl’s Ideas I, ed. Andrea Staiti (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015), 177–93; Dagfinn Føllesdal, ‘Husserl’s Reductions and the Role They Play in His Phenomenology’, in A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism, ed. by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 240–52. 20 Zahavi, ‘Phenomenology of Reflection’, 184–88. 21 On the Seinsfrage, see Heidegger, Being and Time, 28–35; ‘[D]asein’, as he put it, ‘is an entity which does not just occur among other entities. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it’. Ibid., 32. 22 Noël Carroll, ‘Art and Mood: Preliminary Notes and Conjectures’, The Monist 86, no. 4 (2003): 521–55; and Cf. Erik Ringmar, ‘Outline of a Non-Deliberative, Mood-Based, Theory of Action’, Philosophia 77, no. 7 (2016). 23 Gernot Böhme, ‘Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics’, trans. David Roberts, Thesis Eleven 36, no. 1 (1 August 1993): 113–26. 24 Erwin W. Straus, ‘The Upright Posture’, The Psychiatric Quarterly 26, no. 1–4 (1 January 1952): 549. 25 Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 170–75. 26 Matthew Ratcliffe, ‘The Feeling of Being’, Journal of Consciousness Studies 12, no. 8–9 (1 January 2005): 49. 27 Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 64–77; Heidegger, Being and Time, 172–79. 28 Ratcliffe, ‘The Feeling of Being’, 54–55. 29 Martin Heidegger, ‘What Calls for Thinking?’ in Basic Writings, 359–67. 30 Heidegger, ‘Meßkirch’s Seventh Centennial’, 49. 31 Ibid., 53.

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32 On the role of attention in Heidegger’s work, see Lawrence A. Berger, ‘Dasein as Attention: The Metaphysics of the Effort of Presence’ (Ph.D. diss., The New School, 2016). 33 Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World View’, 341–55. Cf. Hans Ruin, ‘Ge-Stell: Enframing as the Essence of Technology’, in Martin Heidegger: Key Concepts, ed. Bret W. Davis (Durham: Acumen, 2010), 183. 34 Slaby, ‘The Other Side of Existence’, 18–19. 35 Heidegger, Being and Time, 228–35. 36 Ibid., 235. 37 ‘[B]oredom impels entranced Dasein into the moment of vision as the properly authentic possibility of its existence’. Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 153. 38 Heidegger, Being and Time, 136–42. Cf. also Taylor Carman, ‘Must We Be Inauthentic?’ in Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, ed. Mark A. Wrathall and Jeff E. Malpas (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 13–28. 39 On the phenomenology of attention, see Sven P. Arvidson, The Sphere of Attention: Context and Margin (London: Kluwer Academic, 2006). 40 Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 148; see further Ringmar, ‘Attention and the Cause of Modern Boredom’, 193–202. 41 Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 147–48. 42 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London: R. & J. Dodsley, 1757), 41–42. 43 Heidegger, Being and Time, 229. 44 See, inter alia, Michael Cowan, Cult of the Will: Nervousness and German Modernity (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2008), 24–31, 69–110; and Ringmar, ‘The Problem of the Modern Self’, 67–86. 45 See, inter alia, Théodule Ribot, Les maladies de la volonté (Paris: Germer Baillière et Cie, 1883); and Jules Payot, L’Éducation de la volonté (Paris: F. Alcan, 1903). 46 Cowan, Cult of the Will, 111–70. 47 Ibid., 111–70; Karl Eric Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in Germany Body Culture, 1910–1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and John A. Williams, Turning to Nature in Germany: Hiking, Nudism, and Conservation, 1900–1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 67–104. 48 Cowan, Cult of the Will, 21–64. 49 Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 51–84. 50 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom (‘La Gaya Scienza’), trans. Thomas Common (New York: MacMillan, 1924), sec. 116. For a discussion, see Scott H. Podolsky and Alfred I. Tauber, ‘Nietzsche’s Conception of Health: The Idealization of Struggle’, in Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science, ed. Babette Babich and Robert S. Cohen, 299–311 (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 204: Springer, 1999), 115–38; and Gregory Moore, Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).



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51 Carol Diethe, Nietzsche’s Sister and the Will to Power: A Biography of Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 81–109. 52 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, sec. 283. 53 Timothy Brennan, ‘Borrowed Light: Nietzsche and the Colonies’, in German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Postwar Germany, ed. Volker Langbehn and Mohammad Salama (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 3–28. More generally, see René Lemarchand, Forgotten Genocides: Oblivion, Denial, and Memory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 54 Roland N. Stromberg, Redemption by War: The Intellectuals and 1914 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1982). Cf. the revisionist account in Jeffrey Verhey, The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth and Mobilization in Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). For a discussion, see Erik Ringmar, ‘ “The Spirit of 1914”: A Redefinition and a Defense’, War in History 23, no. 4 (2016). The chapter on Zarathustra in the trenches is in Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 128–63. 55 In England, it was commonplace to draw a connection between German selfaggrandizement and Nietzsche’s philosophy. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 135. 56 Ibid., 232–71. 57 Davis, Heidegger and the Will, 24–59. 58 Heidegger, Being and Time, 312–48. 59 Davis, Heidegger and the Will, 9–10. 60 Davis discusses four different interpretations of Entschlossenheit. Ibid., 40–59. 61 Tracy B. Strong, ‘Genealogy, the Will to Power, and the Problem of a Past’, in Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: Critical Essays, ed. Christa Davis Acampora (Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield, 2006), 93–106. 62 Heidegger, Being and Time, 119. 63 Ibid., 225–73. 64 Ibid., 238–39; Cf. Berger, ‘Dasein as Attention’, 7–49. 65 ‘[F]or moods’, as Heidegger puts it, ‘are overcome and transformed always only by moods’. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: The Will to Power as Art, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), 99. 66 ‘Willing and wishing are rooted with ontological necessity in Dasein as care. . . . Care is ontologically “earlier” than the phenomena we have just mentioned’. Heidegger, Being and Time, 238. 67 Harries, ‘Heidegger as a Political Thinker’, 647. 68 Strong, ‘Genealogy, the Will to Power, and the Problem of a Past’, 93–106. 69 Nietzsche, The Gay Science; Cf. the discussion of Dewey in Ringmar, ‘The Problem of the Modern Self’, 67–86. 70 See, for example, Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 71 The classical text here is of course Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France: And on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to That Event (London: J. Dodsley, 1790).

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72 For a biographical account, see Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), chap. 13. 73 Fried, Heidegger’s Polemos, 167–85; Harries, ‘Heidegger as a Political Thinker’, 642–69; a key text is Martin Heidegger, ‘The Self Assertion of the German University and the Rectorate, 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts’, Review of Metaphysics 38, no. 3 (1985): 467–502. See also Martin Heidegger, ‘References to Jews and Judaism in Martin Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, 1938–1948’, accessed 8 July 2016, https://www.academia.edu/11943010/References_to_Jews_and_Judaism_in_Martin_ Heidegger_s_Black_Notebooks_1938-1948. 74 Karl Löwith, ‘My Last Meeting with Heidegger in Rome, 1936’, New German Critique, no. 45 (1988): 115–16. For a discussion, see Fried, Heidegger’s Polemos, 137–38, 150–53. 75 Thus, according to Heidegger, the fundamental mood of ancient Greece was one of ‘astonishment’ and of the modern age one of ‘terror’. Cf. Michel Haar, ‘Attunement and Thinking’, in Heidegger: A Critical Reader, ed. by Hubert Dreyfus and Harrison Hall (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 149–61. 76 Quoted in Fried, Heidegger’s Polemos, 138. 77 Martin Heidegger, Einführung in Die Metaphysik (Tübingen: Walter De Gruyter, 1953), 123. Here Heidegger ignores the fact that the two senses of the word have different etymologies. Fuge, the musical composition, is derived from a Latin root, fugere, ‘to flee’, and Fuge, the carpenter’s term, is derived from an ancient Germanic root, fōgijaną, ‘to join together’. See ‘Fuge’, Wiktionary, en.wiktionary.org. Cf. Fried, Heidegger’s Polemos, 142–48. 78 Sophocles, Antigone, ll. 361–72. Martin Heidegger, ‘Parmenides’, in Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 54, ed. Manfred S. Frings (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1992), 134; Heidegger, ‘Chorlied aus der Antigone des Sophokles’, in Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens: Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 13, ed. Hermann Heidegger (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2002). For a discussion, see Clare Pearson Geiman, ‘Heidegger’s Antigones’, in A Companion to Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics, ed. Richard Polt and Gregory Fried (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 161–82. 79 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, sec. 380. 80 Heidegger, Einführung in Die Metaphysik, 116. 81 Quoted in Fried, Heidegger’s Polemos, 143. 82 Fried, Heidegger’s Polemos, 144. 83 Ibid., 148–50; Cf. Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 7–11; On Heidegger and Hesiod, see ibid., 266–69. 84 Stephen Scully, Hesiod’s Theogony: From Near Eastern Creation Myths to Paradise Lost (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 85 Casey, The Fate of Place, 7–11. 86 The jumping body was an important theme in German popular culture during the first decades of the twentieth century. Cowan, Cult of the Will, 130–36; ‘[T]he jump’, as Cowan comments, ‘seemed to offer the most perfect visual realization of energy and willpower’. Ibid., 135.



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87 In particular, the Nazi leadership seems to have preferred Alfred Baeumler. See, for example, Alfred Baeumler, Nietzsche der Philosoph und Politiker (Leipzig: Reclam, 1931). For a discussion, see Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 234, 239–40. 88 Meeting him in 1936, his former student Karl Löwith insisted that Heidegger ‘was convinced now as before that National Socialism was the right course for Germany; one only had to “hold out” long enough’. Löwith, ‘My Last Meeting with Heidegger in Rome, 1936’, 115–16. 89 Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World View’, 341–55; Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in Basic Writings, 283–317; Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, 319–43; and for a discussion, see Davis, Heidegger and the Will, 146–84. 90 The transformation starts with Heidegger’s third volume on Nietzsche and continues in his lecture courses on Hölderlin’s poetry in the late 1930s. See Davis, Heidegger and the Will, 100–121. 91 ‘Agriculture is now a motorized food-industry – in essence, the same as the manufacturing of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockading and starving of nations, the same as the manufacture of hydrogen’. Quote from an early draft of Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’. In the published version all but the first five words are omitted (cf. ibid., 296). Heidegger’s revisions are discussed in Wolfgang Schirmacher, Technik Und Gelassenheit: Zeitkritik Nach Heidegger (Freiburg: Alber, 1983), 25; Thomas Sheehan, ‘Heidegger and the Nazis’, New York Review of Books 35, no. 10 (16 June 1988). 92 Davis, Heidegger and the Will, 216–38; and Davis, ‘Will and Gelassenheit’, 168–81. 93 See, inter alia, Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). 94 Berger, ‘Dasein as Attention’, 119–27. 95 Ringmar, ‘Outline of a Non-Deliberative, Mood-Based, Theory of Action’. 96 Beckett’s play was originally written in French, En attendant Godot. 97 Martin Heidegger, ‘ “Only a God Can Save Us”: The Spiegel Interview (1966)’, in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan and trans. William J. Richardson (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2009), 58. 98 Wolin, The Politics of Being, 147. 99 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Basic Writings, 149–87; discussed in Meyer Schapiro, ‘The Still Life as a Personal Object: A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh’, in The Reach of Mind. Essays in Honor of Kurt Goldstein, ed. Marianne L. Simmel (New York: Springer, 1968): 203–9. 100 Quoted in Davis, ‘Will and Gelassenheit’, 176. 101 Eugene T. Gendlin, ‘The Wider Role of Bodily Sense in Thought and Language’, in Giving the Body Its Due, ed. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 195–96. 102 David Michael Levin, The Body’s Recollection of Being: Phenomenological Psychology and the Deconstruction of Nihilism (London: Routledge, 1991).

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103 On physiological metaphors in Nietzsche, see Moore, Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor, 21–114; On Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, see Kevin A. Aho, ‘The Missing Dialogue between Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty: On the Importance of the Zollikon Seminars’, Body & Society 11, no. 2 (1 June 2005): 1–23. 104 See, inter alia, Francisco J. Varela, ‘Neurophenomenology: A Methodological Remedy for the Hard Problem’, Journal of Consciousness Studies 3, no. 4 (1 April 1996): 330–49; Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991); and Matthew Ratcliffe, ‘Heidegger’s Attunement and the Neuropsychology of Emotion’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1, no. 3 (1 September 2002): 287–312. 105 Among many studies, see J. B. Deijen, M. L. Heemstra and J. F. Orlebeke, ‘Dietary Effects on Mood and Performance’, Journal of Psychiatric Research 23, no. 3–4 (1989): 275–83; Fritz Strack, Leonard L. Martin and Sabine Stepper, ‘Inhibiting and Facilitating Conditions of the Human Smile: A Nonobtrusive Test of the Facial Feedback Hypothesis’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54, no. 5 (1988): 768–77. 106 On collective callisthenics in Germany at the turn of the twentieth century, see Cowan, Cult of the Will, 111–70; on ‘social hiking’, see Williams, Turning to Nature in Germany, 67–104; on ‘mass dancing’, see Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy, 300–320; more generally, see William H. McNeill, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (New York: ACLS Humanities E-Book, 2008); and Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007). 107 Levin, The Body’s Recollection of Being, 281–317. 108 As forcefully argued in Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism. 109 Or, in a philosophical vein, we could argue that the question of Being remains crucial regardless of Heidegger’s own answers to it. See Gregory Fried, ‘The King Is Dead: Heidegger’s “Black Notebooks” ’, Los Angeles Review of Books, 13 September 2014, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/king-dead-heideggers-black-notebooks/#!, ‘The King Is Dead’. 110 Ringmar, War and Willpower. 111 On the ‘fall’ of France and its subsequent prostrate posture, see Jean-Paul Sartre, Iron in the Soul (London: Penguin, 2002), 85–86. On China ‘standing up’, see Mao Zedong, ‘The Chinese People Have Stood Up!’ UCLA Center for East Asian Studies, 21 September 1949. 112 Cf. therapeutic applications such as those of Eugene Gendlin. See Eugene T. Gendlin, ‘Heidegger and the Philosophy of Psychology’, Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry 16, no. 1–3 (1978): 43–71. For a discussion, see Erik Ringmar, ‘Eugene Gendlin and the Feel of International Politics’, in Researching Emotions in IR: Methodological Perspectives for a New Paradigm, ed. Maéva Clément and Eric Sagar (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

Chapter 7

Who Is the Peasant Woman Who Trudges through the Fields? Provincializing Eurocentric Artistic Space Tina Chanter The aim of this chapter is to analyse Martin Heidegger’s ostensibly apolitical but in fact Eurocentric account of art. I argue for a more inclusive account of art and its political role in the contemporary, global, age by raising a series of critical questions about how both Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas examine art in ways that are based on Eurocentric presuppositions. Drawing on Jacques Rancière, my intention is to overcome the geo-political and conceptual limitations of Heidegger’s account of art in order to reopen the thinking of art as a space of political indeterminacy. As I elaborate in the first section of the chapter, ‘The Philosophy of Art and the Art of Philosophy’, for all his efforts to break with Western metaphysical assumptions, an essential aspect of Heidegger’s thinking of art is continuous with an historical line that unites him with Hegel and, before that, with Plato. All three thinkers regard art (or, in Plato’s case images, since strictly speaking art cannot be said to occupy a separate domain for him) as having no other ontological determination than that of philosophy: both aspire to reveal the truth of the world. By contrast, Levinas and Rancière (though they differ markedly in other respects) insist upon the discontinuity between art and philosophy. Levinas’s thinking on art and philosophy issues a challenge to Heidegger in wresting art from philosophy’s ontological domain, while Rancière brings into question the rigidity with which any strict ontological divide can be imposed between the realms of art, philosophy and politics. At the same time, Rancière’s reflections upon art and politics help to elucidate the sense in which both Levinas and Heidegger, despite profound divergences, remain captive to a Eurocentric view of art. Approaching Heidegger’s discussion of the artwork through Levinas’s critique of it also allows us to isolate two aspects of that discussion that are 161

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somewhat in tension with one another. First, Levinas’s critique of Heidegger on art highlights precisely that aspect of phenomenological attitudes to art that has proved productive for feminist appropriations of phenomenology, and for other politically progressive interpretations. Thus art, for Heidegger, on Levinas’s reading, becomes a sign of the times, epitomizes a cultural epoch, comes to stand for a way of seeing things, sums up the climate of a culture, and in this way it comes to represent the totality of the culture from which it emanates. Art can be read as a symptom of culture. Although Levinas is critical of phenomenology for tying art too closely to the context and culture out of which it emerges, this contextual approach to art has in fact been taken up by a good deal of contemporary theory. However, such an approach can go too far; in the penultimate section of this paper I shall go on to raise some critical questions about the exclusivity with which Heidegger imbibes his understanding of art as capturing the spirit of a nation, unifying a culture, and the notion of community that this assumes. It is this exclusivity that drawing on the work of Rancière helps to relieve, at the same time as his work endorses the specificity of political works of art neither as that which is granted through some deviation from a supposedly timeless, eternal essence of art, nor through a simple reduction of art to some kind of political message, but rather through political dissensus. For his part, Heidegger’s critique of the relation between form and matter as classically conceived remains invaluable; his recasting of this essentially Aristotelian distinction in terms of the strife of world and earth is fundamental to contemporary thinking on aesthetics, including, even if indirectly, that of Rancière. However Rancière inflects his rethinking of this classical distinction in a manner that, in my view, is much more politically progressive and productive than Heidegger’s rethinking of it within the context of truth recast as aletheia, understood by Heidegger in terms of unconcealment, unveiling, or bringing out of oblivion or hiding. Levinas’s critique both alerts us to the way Heidegger’s account of art opens up a new way of thinking that which had been consigned to the label materiality, as thought in opposition to its inevitable corollary, form; this is the second reason it is productive to approach Heidegger via Levinas. Heidegger lays the groundwork, with the notion of earth, for detaching the sonorous musicality of tone, or the rockiness of the rock, from any preconceived frame of thinghood. At the same time, one might say, having opened up this possibility, his thinking also closes it down, while Levinas stays with it a little longer (even if in a different way, he too must close it down ultimately). In the penultimate section below, ‘Binary divisions’, I elaborate Heidegger’s effort to overcome the pervasive influence of the form/matter distinction in aesthetic thinking, and his ultimate recapitulation of the tropes in terms of which this distinction continues to orchestrate metaphysical



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thinking. Prior to that, in the section ‘Beyond Materiality?’, I show how Levinas situates his account of art with regard to phenomenology, while in ‘The Art Paradox’ I explore a fundamental paradox in Levinas, one that plays itself out at the performative level of his writing, which, at the same time that it denounces artistry (and in this respect Levinas mimics Plato’s dialogically dramatic denunciation of poetry) also employs a poetic register in order to effect this very judgment. Explicitly stated, the paradox that haunts Levinas’s thinking of art is that, in keeping with the biblical injunction against iconography (with which Levinas assimilates all art in so far as he construes all art as plastic art), Levinas condemns art as being dangerous and evil.1 Yet he also positions philosophy as the redeemer of art, since philosophy draws out the true meaning of art, and that true meaning, according to Levinas, amounts to an ethics of obligation – just as the Judaic prohibition of images remains the stubborn informant of the negative judgment Levinas casts on images as pernicious, so too his ethics cannot escape the resonance of religiosity, as when Levinas is unable to recognize in Palestinians the Other to whom I am infinitely obligated. THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART AND THE ART OF PHILOSOPHY To the extent that Heidegger looks to poets such as Friedrich Hölderlin to reveal a ‘higher truth’, he might invert the priority that philosophy assumes over art in Plato or Hegel, but does not question the underlying assumption that art and philosophy share the same ontological goal. This, at least, is Levinas’s view. Rather than judging art according to a philosophical standard to which it fails to live up, or reversing the priority of philosophy over art, and holding up the artist as the one who testifies to the truth, so that it falls to the philosopher to interpret that truth (even if, as in Heidegger, truth is understood as aletheia, and the artwork is understood as revealing the play of concealment and unconcealment), Levinas understands the ontological function allotted to art to diverge from that of philosophy. In this he affirms the importance of understanding art as image, as sensibility.2 Yet at the same time as specifying the ontological function of art as diverging from that of philosophy, Levinas develops his views on art in ways that rejoin and intersect with the Heideggerian view from which they ostensibly depart. This is not to say that his views are the same as Heidegger’s. As already indicated, there are significant differences. Insofar as Levinas insists upon a certain ontological disjuncture between art and philosophy, he anticipates an important gesture that Rancière, who returns to Immanuel Kant and Friedrich von Schiller, also elaborates, albeit in a more political and contingent register. In this way, Rancière can be understood as developing a

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tendency Levinas opens up (even if Levinas himself would not pursue it in this direction) in such a way as to show the fluidity of the lines distinguishing art from politics and philosophy. In doing so, he frees up the borders of art, making it a category capable of reworking and thereby accessible to art that Western metaphysical aesthetic assumptions had precluded. The irreducibility of philosophy to art is a commitment Levinas shares with Rancière, for whom neither philosophy nor politics are reducible to art. Insofar as Levinas’s ethical philosophy undergoes a (not always so surreptitious) elision with the politics of Judaism, the superiority Levinas erects for philosophy over art all too easily relapses into a reduction of art to a specific political defence of Israel. At times the only ethical rationale for the legitimation of art for Levinas seems reducible to an expression of the suffering of Jewish peoples and their consequent need for a homeland, which, the implication can be, must be defended at any cost, including the cost of a Palestinian homeland. Here it is not so much that Levinas’s concern with my infinite obligation to the neighbour deserts him, but rather a matter of a disconcertingly direct and frank disavowal of the humanity of Palestinians as capable of exercising an ethical claim that is equal to that of others. Palestinians, it would seem, do not count as Other (Autrui) in Levinas’s sense of an absolute alterity that can command my infinite obligation. Levinas’s statements in this regard fit uncannily well with Rancière’s notion of the miscount.3 Here, those who do not count are those who are not figured as neighbours to whom I am ethically and infinitely obligated. The Levinasian ethical preclusion of Palestinians as capable of figuring as the Other to whom I am infinitely ethically obligated amounts to a political ‘miscount’ in Rancière’s sense. Just as there are those who share no part in political decisions for Rancière because the animal noises they voice are not recognized as speech by those who determine what counts as logos, so that their voices do not constitute discourse, so those who have no part in the scenario of ethical obligation that guides Levinas’s philosophy lack speech in any meaningful sense. The ‘Here I am’ is not addressed to them. In recognizing a specific aesthetic sense that is irreducible to philosophy or truth, Levinas’s critique of Heidegger is salutary, although, once we understand the self-obfuscation, self-refusal, concealment or withdrawal of Being that Heidegger explicates as ‘earth’ in his analysis of art, the non-truth of art as image in Levinas can also be read as extending this aspect of Heidegger’s thought. Insofar as Levinas absolutizes the ontological discontinuity between art and philosophy (and nonetheless, paradoxically, ultimately reasserts the authority of philosophy over art), I maintain, he goes astray. Rancière, for his part, construes the distinction between art objects and other kinds of objects (including those of philosophical contemplation) as more porous, and



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sees the very ontological distinction between different kinds of things as an inevitably political distinction, and therefore capable of infinite plasticity, subject to continual revision. His appeal to the ontological indeterminacy between objects of art and objects of life allows Rancière to both retain a certain independence for the artwork, elucidating the specificity of works of art – their distinction from other kinds of things – without insisting upon a categorical distinction between aesthetic objects or events and other things or events. It allows that the same object (or event) can qualify as art for some but not for others, and that some objects can become, or cease to be art; in different ways, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, or urinal as art, is illustrative of this point, as is the fact that, with regard to its status as art, a Greek temple functioned differently for the Greeks than it does for us, as both Heidegger and Hegel maintain.4 Rancière does not discriminate between art objects/events on the basis of some permanent and unchangeable feature of their identity, where identity is understood as consistency through time, or even spatial coherence, if space is understood to be geometrically specifiable, as that which is capable of being measured, mapped or quantified according to co-ordinates. Rather he understands the specificity of art – and even the way it redistributes space and time – as precisely the result of a political negotiation, and therefore as subject to change, both through time and across cultures. For Rancière, whose insight I want to affirm, the distinction between art, philosophy, and politics is under constant negotiation. It will transform on the basis of historical developments, which will feed into and help define art; since history continues to unfold in ways that are implicated politically, the conditions in relation to which art is defined are themselves inconstant and subject to transformations – transformations that take place through political and artistic dissensus. The relation of politics to philosophy, in turn, is subject to the vagaries of contingency in the sense that philosophy, as Rancière puts it, has long been ‘at the margin of politics’.5 THE ART PARADOX While Levinas’s critique of Heidegger remains valuable in some of its aspects, particularly in the distance Levinas takes on the ontological continuity that Heidegger preserves between philosophy and art, and in helping to elucidate the aesthetic stakes of Heidegger’s recasting of materiality in terms of what he calls the ‘strife of earth and world’, Levinas and Heidegger equally enjoin us to a conception of the work of art that embraces a kind of elitist political exclusivity, when it comes both to the creators of the work of art, and to its reception.

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In his early 1948 essay, ‘Reality and its Shadow’, which represents Levinas’s first, and most expansive discussion of his own approach to art, Levinas sets forth a paradox. On the one hand, he issues a harsh judgment on art, which, at first glance, would appear to be condemned, unremittingly sentenced to a negative status. Levinas associates art with evil, magic, danger, distraction and evasion of serious things – evasion of the infinite ethical obligation to the Other in terms of which he defines philosophy’s ultimate meaning. Yet, at the same time as insisting upon these incontrovertibly negative characterizations, he also asserts the importance of considering art within the context of philosophical critique. Thus, it falls to the philosopher to draw out the proper meaning of art, which, for Levinas, ultimately means to establish the meaning that art has for the ethical relation of the face to face. For Levinas, most decisively – although through his appeal to philosophical/ethical truth he tracks a circuitous path around this fundamental characterization of art as inhibiting truth – art does not reveal truth but participates in non-truth, duality, doubling. Art shadows reality. At the same time, the play of concealment and unconcealment that Heidegger uncovers in the work of art might be said to be reconfigured in Levinas’s understanding of the relationship between art on the one hand, as image, non-reality, and sensibility, and philosophy on the other hand, as concept, as that which opens onto ethics. Levinas, for all his insistence upon the ontological discontinuity between art and philosophy, on their ontological independence of one another, on the fact that art and philosophy are simply different kinds of things, ultimately succumbs to a quasi-Hegelian compromise. Just as Hegel carved out a unique role for art as the sensuous presentation of truth, but finally subordinated art to philosophy in the overall scheme of dialectical thinking, so Levinas, while insisting that art does not reveal the truth, but rather mystifies it, then goes on to posit the philosopher, the critic, as the one responsible for drawing out the true meaning of art – which for Levinas means establishing the priority of ethics. Thus, the shadowy, doubling role that the work of art plays in relation to Levinas’s understanding of philosophy (which points to something essential in the nature of being and ontology itself, for Levinas) turns out to be not only reminiscent of a Platonic order of things, but also somewhat akin to the concealment or self-refusal of earth in Heidegger’s understanding of the strife of earth and world as the event of aletheic truth, happening in and through the work of art. Even if the philosophical meaning of artworks (like all philosophical meaning in the last analysis for Levinas) must be ethical, while the ethicality of the art work is not necessarily what is ultimately at stake in the meaning of artworks for Heidegger, the status of the art work is aligned with ‘non-truth’ in Levinas. It is left to philosophy to draw out its meaning, its truth, to explicate, through critique, the significance of art, so



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that the relation of art and philosophy in Levinas is nonetheless reminiscent of the productive conflict Heidegger understands as the earth’s concealment or hiding at the heart of the unconcealment of world that is continually at play in the work of art. There is another dimension to the paradox with which Levinas’s views on art present the reader. Not only is it the case that readers are left to reconcile Levinas’s apparent condemnation of art with philosophy’s recuperative capacity of its powers. We also have to consider Levinas’s constant appeal to art in his own philosophy, as not merely illustrative of that philosophy, but as profoundly bound up with it, and the fact that his own writing has a poetic aspect to it.6 Notwithstanding Levinas’s pejorative views on art, in a footnote to ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, Derrida characterizes Levinas’s Totality and Infinity itself as a ‘work of art’.7 It ‘proceeds’, says Derrida, ‘with the infinite insistence of waves on a beach . . . as each return recapitulates itself, it also infinitely renews and enriches itself’.8 Art and philosophy would then both follow and precede one another, call for one another, wave upon wave, each wave sweeping up the wake of the receding one, infinitely renewing it. There is, then, a performative dimension to Levinas’s philosophy that supplements his formal insistence upon maintaining art and philosophy as ontologically distinct from one another. Performatively, in his work, art and philosophy play off one another productively, one might say, in much the same way as Levinas’s notions of the saying and the said relate to one another. So too Heidegger’s conceptions of earth and world, which also, in their very strife, tension, or conflict, call for one another, and require one another, even as they resist any reduction to one another. BEYOND MATERIALITY? Levinas is critical of phenomenology, for which, he claims, all meaning is metaphorical. For phenomenology, there is no ‘pure receptivity’ outside an ‘already signifying’ system.9 Levinas’s critique is directed towards phenomenology’s historicization of phenomena, its prioritizing of the context, world, or horizon within which phenomena are understood. Phenomenology privileges cultural, linguistic totalities, according to Levinas, and fails to recognize the transcendent value of humanity, which, according to Levinas, claims the I in the face to face encounter. In its understanding of culture and language as providing the horizon within which the meaning of objects is understood, phenomenology accords a privileged role to art, which becomes the ultimate event in which the world expresses itself ontologically. While he criticizes this view, reserving the notion of expression for the absolute, transcendent infinity of the face of the

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Other, Levinas also sees his own return to what he regards as a new kind of Platonism as mediated by phenomenology. ‘The given’, Levinas tells us, in his analysis of phenomenology – from which he wants to take his distance – ‘is presented from the first qua this or that, that is as a meaning. . . . This taken as that – meaning is not a modification that affects a content existing outside of all language. . . . In the this as that, neither the this nor the that is first given outside discourse’.10 What is given is given as already meaningful. In ‘Peace and Proximity’, in a passage that suggests what happens when we take something as a type we recognize, Levinas says: ‘It is evident that it is in the knowledge of the other (autrui) as a simple individual – individual of a genus, a class, or a race – that peace with the other (autrui) turns into hatred; it is the approach of the other as “such and such a type” ’.11 Typologies of others – as racialized, gendered or as foreigner, for example, enable and facilitate negative stereotypes. Still characterizing phenomenology, Levinas expresses his scepticism about the view that language and experience ‘signify on the basis of the “world” and of the position of the one that looks at them’.12 A world presents others or things in a certain light, from a certain perspective, or position. For phenomenology, ‘Of itself a look would be relative to a position’.13 For the phenomenologist, ‘language refers to the positions of the one that listens and the one that speaks, that is to the contingency of their history. To try to inventory up all the contexts of language and of the positions in which interlocutors can find themselves would be a demented (insensée) undertaking’.14 With regard to the ‘demented’ effort to account for the position and context of every interlocutor, let me merely pause to observe that such an undertaking is precisely what seems to be at stake in feminist and race standpoint theories, and has characterized the turn that some feminist, race, and class theorists have taken towards ‘identity politics;’ while such theories should not be reducible to identity politics, it is also the case that identity politics, so long as it is not understood as essentialist, and so long as it is fused with the insights of intersectional theory, can yield, and has yielded, some important moments of political progress. To put the point in another way, in some sense progressive politics should want to affirm an almost obsessive compulsion to account for every individual’s position, to take account of every context, to become aware of the smallest, historical detail of someone’s narrative – not in order to explain away an art work, but in order to have an informed view about the conditions of its production, the psychic and social forces at work in its inception, and the way in which experiences of marginalization, discrimination, exploitation and oppression might play into it. In order not to assume the hegemony of white, male, able-bodiedness . . . (you can finish the list of characteristics that typically renders privilege invisible for yourself) it has been imperative



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to specify experience that is raced, female, those who identify as persons with a disability, and so on. It is important to note that Levinas concedes to some extent the cultural analysis of phenomenology: ‘In all its analyses of language, contemporary philosophy insists, and indeed rightly, on its hermeneutical structure and of the cultural effort on the incarnate being that expresses itself’.15 Or again, ‘The manifestation of the Other (Autrui) is, to be sure, produced from the first in conformity with the way every meaning is produced. The Other is present in a cultural whole and is illuminated by this whole, as a text by its context’.16 Yet he goes on to insist that the other transcends this context. ‘But the epiphany of the Other (Autrui) involves a signifyingness of its own, independent of this meaning received from the world’. The face undoes its form, ‘breaks through’ its ‘plastic essence’.17 There is then, for Levinas, meaning beyond meaning, the signifying of the face that breaks into the totality of culturally inscribed meaning. The trouble is, as we have seen, by excluding certain faces, like those of Palestinians, from those that can break through cultural meanings, Levinas belies his own claim. In the account that Levinas provides of the role that art plays in phenomenological understanding, art becomes the pinnacle of ontological understanding. He says, [C]ulture is art, and art or the celebration of being constitutes the original essence of incarnation. Language qua expression is, above all, the creative language of poetry. . . . Culture and artistic creation are part of the ontological order itself. They are ontological par excellence, they make the understanding of being possible. . . . Artistic expression would thus be an essential event that would be produced in being by artists and philosophers.18

Art is understood here as the highest expression of ontological understanding. In this sense, there is no disruption of the underlying ontological coherence that Platonic or Hegelian metaphysics assume between art and philosophy. Phenomenology posits an ontological continuum between art and philosophy, diverging from metaphysics only in terms of how the hierarchy between the two is established, on the issue of the directionality of the ontological flow that unites them on a scale of adequacy that either celebrates philosophy’s ultimate success at attaining truth (Plato and Hegel), or puts the poetic artist on a pedestal that surpasses anything that the philosopher, alone, without the help of poets can achieve (phenomenology). For Levinas, Heidegger is merely reversing the priority philosophy had previously arrogated to itself over art. I am suggesting that Levinas’s critique of Heidegger, albeit perhaps inadvertently, also brings to light an approach to art that is in fact consonant with an important part of progressive attitudes

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to art. In construing the art work as symptomatic of a given culture – a Heideggerian point of which Levinas is critical – Heidegger might also be said to open up an important dimension of viewing the artwork not just from the point of view of the artist, but also from the point of view of its reception. A similar impulse has made itself felt in many contemporary strains of discourse, including reception theory, reader-response theory and, as mentioned, identity politics. Viewed in this context, Heidegger’s appreciation of the importance of cultural context in understanding the work of art, far from being a mistake, might be understood to open up a valuable path of enquiry. Viewed from Rancière’s critique of those discontent with aesthetics, however, there is reason to be suspicious of any attempt to completely reduce art to a symptom of culture, even those efforts to see art as emblematic of sub-cultures. In the next section, I provide a commentary on selected aspects of Heidegger’s essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ in an effort to deepen our understanding of how it is that Heidegger construes the work of art, and how his account marks an ultimately inadequately radical departure from the guiding distinction of matter and form, which he claims has been a hallmark of the metaphysical tradition of aesthetics that he sees as preceding him.19 In the context of this discussion, I will also elaborate how both Heidegger and Levinas (although the latter more decisively) draw attention to how art detaches sounds or colours from the things to which they attach themselves, or the environments in which they are presented, as always already signifying as something (the sound of a door closing, or a bird singing, and not merely the bare sensation of sounds). I suggest that the form/matter distinction is embedded in a series of other problematic distinctions, which Heidegger does not manage to dislodge, distinctions that might be understood to anchor the account of form and matter, a distinction that therefore remains to haunt Heidegger’s account. Perhaps, then, Heidegger’s effort to overcome a metaphysical aesthetics remains ensconced in a further series of distinctions which themselves are in need of displacement and rethinking, not the least of which is the differentiation of feminine and masculine. BINARY DIVISIONS An organizing motif of Heidegger’s argument – indeed his main argument against traditional aesthetics – is the inadequacy of the distinction that characterizes the aesthetic approach to works of art, namely the distinction between form (morphē) and matter (hulē).20 Heidegger acknowledges that the form/ matter distinction has been associated with a series of other metaphysical distinctions. Form has been ‘correlated with the rational and matter with



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the irrational . . . the rational is taken to be the logical and the irrational the alogical . . . the subject-object relation is coupled with the conceptual pair form-matter’.21 His acknowledgment does not extend, however, to the association, also found in the history of Western metaphysics, of form, rationality and subjectivity with masculinity, and of matter with irrationality, the object and femininity.22 Yet while Heidegger seeks to shed what he construes as the confining and misleading conceptual framework of ‘formed matter’, he still adheres to the conceptual machinery in which the distinction of form and matter is grounded, an apparatus that not only lines up form with shape, and matter with the stuff contained by shape, but which also construes form as the organizing principle, and associates masculine creativity with this organizing principle, modelling the creativity of artists on the creative capacity of a divine maker.23 By corollary, femininity is associated with passive matter, infused with an organizational and decisively masculine principle/ form (Aristotle’s archē). Racialized distinctions follow a similar pattern, and although Plato’s chora has been appropriated by various thinkers, including Derrida and Kristeva as providing a more fertile ground for thinking femininity/maternity, one that in some sense precedes perhaps gives birth to the form/matter distinction, it is the Aristotelian heritage that asserts itself in Heidegger’s effort to combat the form/matter distinction, an effort that perhaps inadvertently, I am suggesting, adheres to that tradition, despite its attempted departure. If this organizing principle has been traditionally associated with rationality, logic and the subject, Heidegger’s reorientation of the discourse of rationality, calculative thinking and subjectivity recasts the question of truth so that it is no longer understood in terms of correctness, in terms of a correlation or agreement between the concepts of the mind and external, physical reality. Truth is now to be understood as aletheia, as the play of concealment and unconcealment, as the disclosure of beings in their being. One way in which this disclosure happens is in and through the work of art, in its standing out from the recalcitrant, obdurate self-refusal into which it can also withdraw or recede. In this discourse of truth as aletheia, of the disclosure of being that is wrested from its hiddenness, earth is associated with phusis, as both origin, and organizing principle, a sheltering agent that allows the artist to bring forth and make shine ‘for the very first time’ the material that, under the artist’s hand, is used not in the sense of being used up, but in such a way that the rock ‘first becomes rock’.24 It comes into itself, comes into its own. And as the ‘rock gleams’ it makes visible in a new way the sky against which the temple forms a silhouette. ‘The temple’s firm towering makes visible the invisible space of air’.25 At stake in Heidegger’s polemic against traditional aesthetics is its tendency to assume a mimetic stance.26 For Heidegger, art is definitely rescued from any straightforward imitative, representative function. If the materiality

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of artwork can no longer be consigned to irrationality, the alogical, or the object, if the recasting of truth as aletheia has put into question the model of truth conceived in terms of adequation, where the form of ideas is adequate to the material reality of the world they are taken to represent, according to a preconceived idea of correctness, then how must materiality be thought? Heidegger recasts materiality not in terms of its falling short of form, rationality, and subject, but rather in terms of its appearing in the artwork in a way that is covered over, or unattainable when we approach objects from the standpoint of our everyday experience of the world. The form-matter distinction is introduced, in Heidegger’s account, as a response to the inadequacy of the notion of the thing that focuses on the senses, ‘the thing as aistheton, that which is perceptible by sensations in the senses belonging to sensibility’.27 So long as we approach the ‘thingly character of the thing’ by way of the senses we will never succeed, Heidegger suggests, because We never really first perceive a throng of sensations, e.g. tones and noises, in the appearance of things – as th[e] thing concept alleges; rather we hear the storm whistling in the chimney, we hear the three-motored plane, we hear the Mercedes in immediate distinction from the Volkswagen. Much closer to us than all sensations are the things themselves. We hear the door shut in the house and never hear acoustical sensations or even mere sounds.28

The work of art disrupts this circuit of signification – and here we come to the second point, enumerated above. As already indicated, Levinas makes much of this point, that is, of the way that colours do not conform to the shapes of objects (see Existence and Existents), the way that art goes beyond the view that he attributes to phenomenology, such that a colour is always the colour of something, of a dress, for instance.29 In art, for Levinas, ‘red reddens’.30 Indeed, it is precisely this quality of art, its ultra-materiality, that gives it a somewhat privileged role in Levinas’s philosophy (though finally art’s meaning will be only recuperable through the ethical authority of Levinas’s revised understanding of philosophy). Art, for Levinas, allows us to catch sight of that world behind the scenes, where existence/existing has not yet been wholly taken up by substantives, where existents lapse back into anonymity, where the ‘il y a’ prevails, and where no-one, certainly not a unified Dasein capable of projecting its selfunderstanding of the world as a totality, is master of the rhythms according to which tastes, colours, sounds, come to me. Where the ‘me’ that these sensations are said (e.g., by empiricism) to approach is not yet a unified ego, where, rather there is an ‘I’ (an ‘I’ who is a not-yet subject) who bathes in the elements, in sensibility (see Totality and Infinity). Ultimately, for Heidegger, the capacity of the work of art to provide access to tones or sounds apart from how they are presented within the equipmental



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world view, or outside the ‘situation’ that ‘always prevails’, or independently of ‘the things themselves’ is exactly what is at stake in the jutting out of the earth into the world.31 One of the inadequacies of approaching the work of art as a thing, for him, is that such an approach can only ever subordinate colours to things, understanding them as meaningful within a circuit of significance that is already dominated by the equipmental approach to beings. The work of art differs from this in that it thematizes, makes available to us, unifies, or brings into relief the spirit of an age. In Iain Thomson’s words in art we find ‘an understanding of being that does not reduce entities either to modern objects to be controlled or to late-modern resources to be optimized’.32 For the Greeks, for example, ‘the temple worked . . . to unify a coherent and meaningful historical world around itself (by inconspicuously focusing and illuminating its people’s sense of what is and what matters)’.33 What, then, becomes of the masculine and raced associations with rationality and the subject, and femininity with irrationality and the object in the recasting of the form/matter distinction as the ‘setting up of a world and the setting forth of earth’?34 Do these associations simply fall away, as Heidegger recasts truth not as a question of correctness, but rather as a question of aletheia, as the disclosure of being from its hiddenness? Or are these associations reinstated in Heidegger’s reworking of the question of the origin of the work of art? In what sense is there a move away from the artist as cause in Heidegger’s essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’? How successfully does Heidegger accomplish the move he tries to make away from the artist as the origin of the work of art, in the sense of the artist originating, causing, or producing the artwork, and towards art as an origin of the work? How far does the fact that the only art that Heidegger considers in this essay (a tendency reiterated elsewhere in his work) originates – at least where the artist is known – from Western, male, artists, already prejudge what kind of art qualifies as art for Heidegger? How far does this compromise Heidegger’s claim to move away from the idea of the artist as the decisive origin of art? If only certain types of people are recognized as artists, what becomes of the claim that what matters is not the artist as cause, that rather art is where both the work of art and the artist originate? If there is a move away from understanding art as a thing, and towards understanding it as an event that happens, an event understood as the unfolding of truth, as aletheia, in which there is a setting forth/setting up of earth and world, what kind of world is set up? If the ‘silent call of the earth’ vibrates in the shoes van Gogh depicts,35 in what ways is the Heideggerian notion of world silently circumscribed by European and masculinist preconceptions of who qualifies as an artist on Heidegger’s world view, and how are those entrusted with the preservation of art set up by Heidegger to constitute a community exclusive of non-Europeans, non-Greeks? Even as Heidegger

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moves towards embracing the idea of the viewer, audience or spectator of art playing a role in constituting art as art, and thereby moves away from emphasizing artistic intention, or inspired, individualistic genius, as determining the character of art, he re-inscribes the kind of falsely universalist assumptions implicated in standard readings of Kant’s sensus communis.36 If for Kant, aesthetic judgments of taste should be universal – a should that carries a moral force that appears to invoke everyone, but turns out to invoke an exclusive community – Heidegger’s appeal to those who preserve art as art also indulges certain traits of exclusivity.37 While the effort to include those who preserve art – the community that witnesses art, and celebrates it as art – in his understanding of that which constitutes art, might, at first glance, appear to be a progressive move on Heidegger’s part, those entrusted with the preservation of art will turn out to be riven with highly predictable class and gender-bound traits. The community that preserves art will turn out to be a distinctly European community, and the art this community preserves will turn out to be of distinctly European provenance. If the shoes van Gogh painted, are attributed by Heidegger to a peasant woman, how far is his account shot through with assumptions about the limitations of her perspective, for whom world and earth exist ‘only’ in equipment?38 And why would Heidegger assert this to be the case? Does he assume that a peasant woman who worked in the fields would not have time to go and stand before a painting by van Gogh, a painting depicting shoes that trudge through the fields, a painting that shows the particularity of a being in its being precisely by abstracting the shoes from the field, distancing them from their unobtrusive reliability, depicting them with no ‘surrounding’, suspending the context in which they melt into the invisibility of reliability, the environment in which they disappear into their usefulness? The nothingness with which van Gogh surrounds the shoes he paints, the ‘undefined space’,39 abstracts the shoes from the context in which they serve as useful equipment, where they can be relied upon and makes their reliability available for the­ matization and reflection precisely in doing so. What if the peasant woman took the time to stand before the painting, would she then understand earth and world in a different way from equipmentally?40 In his suggestion that the peasant woman only understands earth and world in an equipmental context, Heidegger qualifies his use of the word ‘only’: ‘World and earth exist for’ the peasant woman that Heidegger imagines to be the wearer of van Gogh’s shoes, ‘and for those who are with her in her mode of being, only thus – in the equipment. We say ‘only’ and therewith fall into error; for the reliability of the equipment first gives to the simple world its security and assures to the world the security of its steady thrust’.41 Who are those who share the peasant woman’s mode of being? Other peasant women? peasant men? Are they peasants, at any rate, or people of a certain



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class, those who work the land, perhaps, who, Heidegger might imagine, are too weary, who trudge too ‘slowly’, to be able to progress from the fields into an art gallery, where they might have seen van Gogh’s shoes, perhaps too taken up with ‘uncomplaining anxiety as to the certainty of bread’ to do so, perhaps too taken up with ‘the wordless joy of having once more withstood want’?42 Is there a difference between those who plough the fields, and those who clean city streets, between the rural and the urban poor? Are all these nameless individuals, peasant women, shippers, charwomen, a part of ‘those who have no part?’ to borrow Rancière’s phrase?43 Those who live in a ‘simple world’, a world that is understood equipmentally, live in a world that is allowed to function, for Heidegger, as providing a preliminary hold on what the work of art is not. The artwork is not a mere thing, and it is not mere equipment, it is not that which is the type of being for which the matter/form distinction is appropriate. But the simple world in which peasants dwell, a world governed by equipmentality, a world in which peasants do not have, and do not take, the time to see their world from the perspective opened up by art, is not, ultimately, the point. The point, for Heidegger, is to abandon the thingly perspective altogether (having benefited from it in a preliminary way that helps us see that the form/matter distinction is grounded in an equipmental perspective, even if it proves inadequate, ultimately to that perspective). Are those who dwell in this simple world not imagined by Heidegger to be open to a world of the play of unconcealment and concealment founded by the work of art? If not, why not? Perhaps they are confined to the truth as correctness, to measuring, to rationality as calculation and prediction, perhaps, in the end, they are not allowed to be thinkers and poets, perhaps they are too busy trying to find the energy to make enough money, to produce enough food to sustain themselves, to be able to go back to work the next day.44 Perhaps they do not understand, because they must not understand, because if they understood, there would be no one to clean the museums. They would all be out visiting the museums, looking at paintings, or painting themselves, in their studios (in the unlikely case that they had done enough cleaning to be able to afford studios). If the cleaners and the farmers understood, those whom Heidegger assumes to be entitled to go, as viewers, to the museums, would be no different from those who clean the museums, or provide the food for museum restaurants. And then, where would we be? If they understood, they might challenge the logos according to which there are those who do, and there are those who think, there are those who lack logos (or, like slaves, only have the type of logos that allows them to follow directions), and those who have logos. Those who have logos, set the terms of the debate, deciding what does, and does not, constitute logos. The world of cleaners is not a world informed by logos, so we are given to understand.45 The way you can tell is

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the way that cleaners are invisible to most of the world. You look through them, past, them, around them. You do not say hallo or see them as people. You do not see them. They are dispensable. Except when they stop cleaning, and go off to become artists. How far is the materiality of art, reworked through the notion of the strife of world and earth, a product of empire, of capital, of its transportability? How far is the provenance, or source of the colours that shine forth in the ‘luster and gleam of the stone’ at issue? Whence came these materials? Who brought them, carried them, quarried them? Did those who quarried the materials with which the temple at Paestum was built see them as ‘mere things’, just as Heidegger imagines the ‘shippers or charwomen in museums’ do?46 What if those who quarried the rocks, those who shipped them, those who fabricated the leather from which the shoes that modelled for van Gogh’s shoes were made, those who clean the museums in which van Gogh’s depictions are housed, the peasant woman whom Heidegger imagines to be the wearer of shoes van Gogh depicts, took the time to see the temple or van Gogh’s painting? What would happen then? Or perhaps we should ask what does happen when a worker, someone whom Heidegger might consign to the lowest of ranks, goes, on a Sunday afternoon, to visit an art gallery? When, rather than resting up in order to replenish themselves through sleep and food, in order to renew their energy, in order to be able to go to work again the next day, cleaning the floors of the museum, a charwoman writes a poem, or a peasant woman who works in the fields works on a book, paints a painting, goes as a visitor to a museum, what happens then? Does Heidegger’s distinction between the work and the thing depend upon a distinction between those who see the artwork as a thing (shippers and charwomen, are his examples of those who might see the work of art as a thing), and those who see it as a work (those endowed with the task of preserving the work of art, a community of art lovers, those with the freedom from repetitive tasks of necessity, those who are accustomed to being cooked for, fed, and cleaned for by the others, who lack such freedom)? What if those who saw the art work as a thing, sometimes also saw it as an artwork? What if they stopped seeing it as a thing? Would it then lose its status as a thing? Or is it rather the case that there is a time and a place, even for art lovers, to see the art work as a thing (perhaps as the curators of an art exhibit are making plans to ship art work), and that this slippage between seeing it as a thing and a work suggests that there is no firm dividing line between everyday things and works of art, as Heidegger would, presumably have us think? Is this slippage ontic or ontological? Why would Heidegger, having circled around the question of what type of thing a work of art is for most of his essay, finally say that ‘we no longer raise [a] question about the work’s thingly element’ but rather we question ‘in terms of the work’?47 This seems to suggest that we must learn,



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in order to properly appreciate art, not to see art as a thing. Never? Then, how would ‘we’ (we lovers of art, we who are privileged, we curators, who facilitate the moving of art from place to place, a we who tends to be specified as male and European and free of undertaking the tasks that are repetitive and necessary for survival) learn to transport it? Unless we employ others (those who are posited as not seeing art as anything other than a thing) to transport it for us, unless we enforce the distinction between us and them, so that we do not have to see the artwork as a thing. ‘We’ employ others to see artwork as a thing, and not as art. How far does the strife of earth and world Heidegger elaborates facilitate a sheltering and allow a gathering together of only certain mortals, and only specific, non-Eastern gods? If the temple that Heidegger cites as exemplary is a Greek temple, how far is his account mediated by Hegelian preconceptions of Greek religion serving as pre-cursor for Christianity, and how much does it justify treating non-European gods as less holy, non-European mortals as less than human? How far does the strife of earth and world reiterate the Trinitarian, dialectical configuration of the movement of Hegelian Spirit? How far does it repeat the tropes according to which Hegel dismisses non-European art as lacking the proper balance of form and matter, the tropes according to which a sublimity overwhelms and confuses the eye through teaming repetition, becoming a bad infinity, or failing to facilitate transcendence? Of failing to overwhelm us so that we can then step back and bask in our ability to recapture ourselves, to recover from the destabilizing, disturbing effects of art, to master ourselves again? Even as Heidegger effects a move away from the form-matter distinction, since it is still too redolent of equipmentality on his account, there remain vestiges of the Hegelian and Kantian accounts of art from which he seeks to distance himself in his attempt to overcome metaphysics. What happens when the Tracey Emin or the Gillian Wearings of this world become artists?48 What is happening now? What happens when childhood abuse takes centre stage, or video installations in small cubicles are designed to maximize our physical discomfort, as we must share a space in proximity with strangers in order to see and hear confessions of other strangers onscreen, sometimes masked, often telling us things we do not necessarily want to hear, sometimes in voices we do not expect to come out of their mouths? What happens to materiality and to invisibility when Guyanan born Ingrid Pollard’s work raises questions about how a pub name or sign on a building sets up a world in a way that invests its British landscape, and the people, the nations, the communities who inhabit it, as contesting one another?49 What happens when the prerogative of naming a pub ‘Black Boy’ is brought into question by an artist who photographs the pub, and exhibits the photograph as part of an experiment, as an invitation to audiences to read or see, or not see, not

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read, the sign that says ‘Black Boy’ as significant, meaningful, problematic, and as deeply implicated in a colonial system of slavery? What happens to the community entrusted with the preservation of art? Does not this community become a split community, a splintered community, a community of contestation, does it not become more than one community, communities in the plural, communities whose contestation attests to the irony that the very pubs that have been named Black Boy would traditionally not have been places that welcome black faces? Does not dissensus take the place of any unified, idealized notion of a community, ethical or not? What happens when Kenyan born Ingrid Mwangi, who has fused her artistic identity with her husband, to become the hyphenated identity Ingrid Mwangi-Robert Hutter, a hyphenation that reflects her diasporic experience, allows the sun to etch upon the skin of her body maps of Germany and Africa, in darker and lighter shades?50 How does she overturn, interrogate, and investigate colonial imperialism, which has so often proceeded in colonial narratives, written by white men, through the employment of appropriating women’s bodies to do the metaphorical work of conquering, as the hills and undulations of territories to be colonized become buttocks or breasts? What happens in Mwangi-Hutter’s photographic installation, in four, larger than life images, Shades of Skin, which cuts her body into segments, mimicking, yet distancing herself from, the commodification and fetishization of female body parts that are eroticized in masculinist imaginaries? What happens as these photographs both expose the black, female body of the artist as vulnerable, and refuse to capitulate to the narratives of lynching and middle-passage to which they nevertheless attest? How do we read the photograph of two dark-skinned feet, dangling, suspended, above the darker earth, in conjunction with the lighter-skinned back, scarred with marks that could have been left by a whip, or in conjunction with a face that closes itself off from viewers, eyes closed, hands protecting it, obscuring our view of the face? What history do we see in these images, and what remains invisible to us? Who is the ‘we’, the ‘us’, ‘I’ invoke here? Who is the viewer, the reader? Who has the time to go to the museum in which Mwangi’s art is displayed, and the leisure to read a philosopher’s reflections upon it? Who will read this, and what will you make of it, and how much does what you make of it depend upon your sex, your, class, the colour of your skin, your history, the thinking you have done about feminism, oppression, colonialism, and racism, on how you have been affected by discrimination, or whether you have been subject to it? CONCLUSION: A POLITICAL ART OF INDETERMINATION Heidegger’s rethinking of temporality and ontology opened up the possibility of thinking the essence of the work of art not in terms of an ontological



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distinction etched in some timeless dividing line differentiating objects of art from other things. He thought the essence of the artwork rather as an event, a happening, a granting, a clearing, but also as a withdrawing or refusal of truth: truth as concealment and unconcealment, as aletheia. The truth of artwork is historical. Yet Heidegger’s views are circumscribed by certain residual, Eurocentric cultural attachments to ideas that remain critically unexamined in his work. While he wants to move away from the conventions of thinking art in relation to genius, to form and matter, and all its attendant distinctions, he remains entrenched in the metaphysical trappings of race, gender and class that confine his attention to taking seriously only certain types of art, only a highly restricted notion of who qualifies as an artist. While he wants to get away from the idea of the artist as the cause of the artwork, he remains attached to it through his failure to question as radically as he might the cultural assumptions that remain invisibly embedded in his account of the work of art. Levinas construes the work of art as a stoppage of time, as interrupting the continuity of time. Time is frozen, essentially immobile in the statue, or in the smile of Mona Lisa. In order for the instant or moment of time that art captures in stone or in pigment to have a future, to move on, in order for art’s interruption of time to be joined up again with the flow of time, the artistic work calls out for interpretation by the philosopher. Whereas Heidegger puts the poet on a pedestal, making the philosopher the humble servant of the poet – it is Hölderlin or van Gogh that reveals the truth that Heidegger explicates – Levinas calls him to task for merely reversing the traditional priority (Platonic) philosophy had accorded philosophy over art. Insisting on the ontological discontinuity between art and philosophy, Levinas rehabilitates, to a certain extent, sensibility, the tonal, the way that ‘red reddens’ (as Heidegger had already begun to do with his notion of earth), the way that the sensory asserts itself not according to the shape, purpose, use, function or significance of things, but precisely in a register of its own, a register that even the concept of sensation distorts. In this respect, he radicalizes and deepens Heidegger’s insight in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ that art allows us to detach sounds from circumspection. Usually we do not just hear a noise, but a storm whistling in chimney. Yet art imposes a musicality, a rhythm of its own, allowing us to halt time, to focus on sound detached from the meaning in which it is habitually ensconced, packaged, as it comes in our everyday lives. A poet allows us to hear language for the first time, yet at the expense of depriving the frozen moment of a future, and in so doing, truncating it of the ethical redemption, the future only the philosopher can bring. It is Hölderlin, along with poets of the ilk of Trakl or Rilke, more than it is van Gogh that Heidegger privileges above all; despite his admiration for Cézanne and Klee, it is the written word above the visual image that is elevated over them. Levinas also privileges the written word above visual

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forms of art, though Heidegger celebrates poetry above all, and Levinas the more exegetical (one might even say Talmudic) style of prose, the novels of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Proust, the plays of Shakespeare. Despite forays into a more diverse array of art than Heidegger (Rodin’s sculpture, Charlie Chaplin’s films, and so on), Levinas remains, like Heidegger, attached to a somewhat modernist bias towards art as pre-eminently literature, and both remain attached to a resolutely European conception of art (primarily Russian, French, or English, primarily Jewish for Levinas, primarily German, Greek, and Christian for Heidegger). Art must contain its own movement away from itself, it must open onto its own reflexivity, it must begin the process of distancing, of questioning or critique that it falls to the philosopher to complete – but largely within European terms. Though the image of the frozen, truncated moment seems more appropriate for visual art (Mona Lisa will always remain about to smile, but she will never smile), Levinas applies it to novels too, which, for him, are ultimately answerable to the demands of plasticity. Their rhythmic flow is a closed sequence, decided in advance by the way in which events solicit the novelist as an already completed series. Novelists write the same characters over and over again, telling the same story; a book is a completed series of events, nothing new ever happens, the characters are trapped in the story forever, they can never do anything different from that which they have always done, they have no future except the one the narrator has given them. For Levinas, the artwork it completed with the last stroke of a brush. Unlike Heidegger, for whom the preservers of art play just as important a role as its creators, this notion of completion seems to exempt viewers or readers of art from any significant role, but, paradoxical as always, Levinas also insists upon considering art within the context of critique, insisting that all the pejorative judgments he makes of art only apply to it so long as we consider art in abstraction from philosophy. In this sense he rejoins Heidegger, insisting on the importance of the role of the audience, at least on the importance of the (philosophically) informed critic – or preferring those artists who perform their own critique (Proust, e.g., or Dostoyevsky). In bringing this discussion to a close, let me return to my earlier suggestion that to construe art as a symptom of culture might be read as consistent with Heidegger’s gesture of historicizing art. Rancière departs from this in his refusal to completely elide the politicization of art with the identification of a cause. He insists upon the fact that for art to be political in the sense he elaborates, that is under the heading of dissensus, whereby a political work of art does not tell its viewers or audience what to think, the artist does not impart a message to the public in the sense of communicating an agenda for action, but rather the political work of art retains an indispensable ambiguity. The political work of art in Rancière’s view does not call for a particular



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transformation of the world in line with an intention revealed by the artist through her intention; it does not assemble or identify a community. Rather it redistributes the sensible, that is most fundamentally, it displaces the rhythms and patterns according to which we temporalize and spatialize the world. Political art intervenes in the current distribution of the sensible, which is orchestrated and ordained by the political powers that be and makes available new modes of perceiving the world, new modes of visualizing how things are. New discourses arise to legitimate and sanction these new modes of visibility, discourses no longer circumscribed by scientific norms of time and space. What art does not do, however, is to tell us what to think or show us how to see. It merely makes available new possibilities for seeing and hearing, and in so doing, makes available new ways of thinking, doing and being. It mitigates against the permanent sanction of any one, given, transcendental schematization; it multiplies the possibilities for perception by making it possible to interrogate orders of perception that take themselves to be, and pass themselves off as, just the way things are. In thinking art works as ambiguous in their politicization, Rancière returns to Kant’s aesthetic idea, to the way in which art is judged neither by pure nor by practical reason, but in relation to the free play of imagination and understanding. Radicalizing Kant’s insight that aesthetic judgment involves no determinate concept, Rancière shows how the indeterminate free play of imagination and understanding disrupts and displaces the classical notion of how form shapes matter, and the associated distinctions that typically align themselves with this distinction, including activity and passivity, whereby the active and conscious intention of the artist shapes matter construed as passive material that conforms to the voluntary will of a creator who shapes it according to a preconceived idea of what qualifies as art. In taking up Kant’s insight into the free play of imagination and understanding, his understanding of genius as a kind of not-knowing, and the malleability of form, which is no longer dictated by a pre-existent concept, such that art can precisely contribute to the re-orchestration of conceptuality, Rancière also opens the way to recalibrate the traditional alignment of femininity and raced others with passive matter and masculinity with active form, even if he does not perform this recalibration himself. Feminist and race theorists can build on his thinking through of the miscount, on his taking seriously those who have been said to have no part, those relegated to the (non-artistic) makers and the doers, as if they had not time to think and to take part in politics, as if they were not qualified to reshape the nation or the state. At the same time feminist and race theorists can help to develop, complement, supplement and sometimes correct those areas of Rancière’s thinking in which he does not push as far as he might. Indeed feminist and race theorists have already begun to push in this direction, in ways that

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are consonant with Rancière’s redistribution of the sensible, which can be seen as a creative extension of Kant’s insight that the aesthetic idea is capable of disturbing and reworking the model of temporality and spatiality that he had tried to contain in the notion of pure forms in his earlier critique.51 Art temporalizes and spatializes in a different way – a thought that also radicalizes Heidegger’s notion Es gibt – it gives/there is.52 Rancière alerts us to the extent to which attempts (such as Heidegger’s) to construe works of art as calls for a unifying community, whether these calls are understood to be ethical or not, remain idealizing at the expense of those who have no part. Instead of seeing art as the embodiment of a lost, or a future community, a community still to come, he sees art as partaking in a redistribution of the sensible, offering different points of view, making available new modes of perception. Art does not bring together, or gather up, the view of things that exist in the cultural, horizontal background, for the most part, inconspicuously informing what we think. Rather it interrupts, disturbs and opens up possibilities for re-envisioning conventional ways of seeing. In doing so, it makes visible the splits, the divisions in communities that are often covered up. It draws attention to how divergent political constituencies see things differently from one another. It opens up a space to dramatize, and dispute those differences, not to paper them over, but to address them, and to remain free to disagree with those who see things differently, free to argue about why they, or you, might be wrong, free to argue about who has the right to decide what does, and what does not, constitute logos. NOTES 1 See Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Reality and Its Shadow’, in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 8. For a detailed reading of Levinas’s ‘Reality and Its Shadow’, see my ‘Aesthetic Blindness: Levinas on the Ambiguous Temporality of Art, Politics and Purification’, MonoKL, Reflections on Levinas, VIII–IX (2010): 512–31. For other works addressing Levinas and art, see Robert Eaglestone, Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997); John Llewelyn, The Hypocritical Imagination: Between Kant and Levinas (London: Routledge, 2000); Jill Robbins, Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1999); and Thomas Carl Wall, Radical Passivity: Levinas, Blanchot and Agamben (Albany: State University of New York, 1999). 2 Levinas, ‘Reality and Its Shadow’, 6–8. 3 I will not rehearse the now well-known debates over the political implications of Levinas’s Judaism for his politics, as his views are well documented and many others have explored this issue. For a good discussion, see Howard Caygill, Levinas and the Political (London: Routledge, 2002).



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4 Martin Heidegger says, for example, when ‘we visit the temple at Paestum at its own site . . . the world of the work that stands there has perished’. See Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Poetry, Language Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 2001), 40. 5 Jacques Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 2007), 2. 6 Not only are Levinas’s references to art (and to many kinds of art, sculpture, painting, literature, film, etc.) legion, his appeals to art are often constitutive of his central insights. Just one example is his frequent appeal to Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov to convey the idea that we are all responsible, but I more than others, and infinitely so. See, for example, Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 146. 7 ‘Certainly, Levinas . . . forbids poetic rapture, but to no avail . . . Totality and Infinity is a work of art and not a treatise’. Cf. Jacques Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 312, note 7. 8 Ibid., 312. 9 Emanuel Levinas, ‘Meaning and Sense’, in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 36–38. 10 Ibid., 38. 11 Ibid., 166. 12 Ibid., 37. 13 Ibid., 39. 14 Ibid., 36–37. 15 Ibid., 52. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 53. 18 Ibid., 41. 19 I make no apology for focusing here, in terms of explicit commentary, solely on ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ (though my reading is also informed by other key works, especially Being and Time, and the later 1920 lecture courses). Some might argue that if one were to turn to other works, such as On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), one might find a slightly more sympathetic attitude on Heidegger’s part to non-Western art, although I would suggest that Heidegger lapses into the romantic/sentimental register even here, and in doing so does not really appreciate non-Western art for itself. I have chosen to focus here on the form/matter distinction, which Heidegger deals with in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, because I think it is the crucial site for understanding Heidegger’s negotiation of the ontology of aesthetics. This essay is rich and important and still has not been fully excavated. My effort here is to insist that Heidegger’s attempt to convincingly overcome the form/matter distinction (a distinction to which critics and commentators have paid insufficient attention in their readings of the essay) comes adrift. It founders, or reaches an impasse, because Heidegger fails to question other key distinctions that constitute the conceptual architecture informing and supporting the work that the form/matter pair has done in elaborating aesthetic theory.

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20 See Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, 26–27. 21 Ibid., 27. 22 Even Heideggerian commentators who pick up on these associations neglect their implications for the masculine/feminine distinction, or for other related distinctions, for example racial distinctions. See, for example, Iain D. Thomson, Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 84, whose reading is, in other ways, illuminating. 23 Aristotle associates form with the masculine and matter with the feminine; in Thomas Aquinas’s medieval appropriation of Aristotelian thought, the model of the divine creator becomes fused with the model of adequation, where truth is understood as correctness. Descartes’s metaphysics lines up rationality with truth and essence in a way that sets up the mind/body distinction as aligned in important ways with the form/matter distinction, a distinction that then plays out in such a way as to line up masculine subjects with the formative power of creators and feminine (non) subjects with the passive substance of materiality, to be shaped and molded by their masters/ husbands/fathers, whose creative processes imitate that of the demiurge. 24 Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, 45–46. 25 Ibid., 41. 26 In contrast, Levinas returns to a mimetic conception of the artwork, although he conceptualizes it in a way that differs from Plato’s straightforward understanding of mimesis as falling short of ideal truth, obfuscating the beauty of ideas. (Of course, nothing is finally straightforward when it comes to gauging Plato’s views on art in the end, if one takes seriously the dramatic form of the dialogues in which he expresses his condemnatory views of tragic poetry; his condemnation of art is enacted within a dramatic dialogue, which itself is poetically/artfully/artistically woven, a conversation in which some interlocutors contest Socrates’s views; unless we take the rather untenable view that Socrates is simply Plato’s mouthpiece, we must take seriously the dramatic structure of Platonic dialogues, as many have argued). 27 Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, 25. The solution of form and matter (which itself turns out to be misleading according to Heidegger) is introduced as an alternative solution to two previous characterizations of the thing, as the ‘bearer of its characteristic traits’ (Ibid., 24), and the [Kantian] view of a thing as ‘nothing but the unity of a manifold of what is given in the senses’ (Ibid., 25). The problem with both interpretations is that the ‘thing vanishes’ (Ibid., 26). In the first interpretation the thing remains ‘at arm’s length from us’, whereas the second interpretation ‘makes it press too hard upon us’ (Ibid.). The problem with the second interpretation is that ‘we never really perceive a throng of sensations’ (Ibid., 25). Rather we hear noises as always already signifying in a definite, meaningful, familiar context. Of course, the work of art will disrupt such contexts, and Heidegger’s discussion of the empty space, or nothingness out of which the shoes van Gogh paints, comes into its own here. 28 Ibid., 25. 29 Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978); and Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 189.



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30 As Levinas puts it, ‘The search for new forms from which all art lives, keeps awake the verbs that are on the verge of lapsing into substantives. In painting red reddens’. Cf. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 40. 31 Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, 25. 32 Thomson, Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity, 67. 33 Ibid. Whereas for Heidegger, as for Schelling, art unifies community, for Rancière, art brings to the fore dissensus. Art is significant for Rancière not in so far as it brings us together, harmonizing us, but insofar as it makes available the clash that he thinks through under the heading of the redistribution of the sensible. Art can make visible that which remained invisible. But in doing so it is not restricted to teaching us; it is not merely that which ‘can help us learn’ or ‘understand’ (cf. Thomson, Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity, 77). If art can help us see things differently, this different way of seeing is not caught up in pedagogical dogma; it is not a question of the artist knowing something and conveying this superior insight to those who view the art produced from a supposedly elevated perspective. The artwork might, and might not, produce a new way of seeing. The artist leaves it up to the viewer or the audience to look, to see or to gauge the sense (in both senses of the word sens) of what is seen. It is not up to the artist to tell us what to think, to disclose the truth. 34 Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, 25. 35 Ibid., 33. 36 In contrast, however, taking his cue from Schiller, Rancière will read Kant’s sensus communis as opening on to an egalitarian revision of traditional aesthetics. 37 See Christine Battersby, The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference (New York and London: Routledge, 2007). 38 Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, 33–34. 39 Ibid., 33. 40 On those who are construed by some as not having time to do anything but work, see, for example, Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 12. 41 Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, 34. 42 Ibid., 33. 43 See Jacques Rancière, Disagreement and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 9. 44 On the connection between Heidegger’s thinking about art and his critique of calculative thinking, see Miguel de Beistegui, The New Heidegger (London: Continuum, 2005). 45 See Rancière, Disagreement and Philosophy, 16, 22. 46 Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, 19. 47 Ibid., 66. 48 Prominent artist and royal academician of the Royal Academy of Arts, Tracey Emin has established a reputation for her controversial works of art. Gillian Wearing, winner of the Turner prize in 1997, uses video, photography and installations to disrupt expectations and displace normative identities.

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49 Ingrid Pollard is a British artist, whose work explores the theme of race and landscape, using photography to unsettle any easy relationship between the countryside, nationalism and identity. 50 Based in Germany and born in Kenya, Ingrid Mwangi has fused her artistic identity with her husband, the artist Robert Hutter, and now goes by the name Mwangi Hutter. She works in a variety of media to interrogate race, discrimination, oppression and post-colonial identity. 51 See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 52 See Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).

Chapter 8

Heidegger’s Hegel, the Christian Jew ‘Europe’ as ‘Planetary Criminality and Machination’1 Laurence Paul Hemming HEIDEGGER AND HEGEL We are still very far from understanding the relation between the thought of Martin Heidegger and the thought of G.W.F. Hegel. It is not even that this relationship is under-researched, although it certainly is;2 nor that much of Heidegger’s own discussion of Hegel has only in very recent years come into the public domain, with the publication not only of his lecture courses, but also now his preparatory notes for, and protocols of, seminars on Hegel. Rather, we are far from understanding this relation because the entire comportment of both Heidegger and Hegel to philosophy as a whole is to the unfolding of the history of philosophy itself. The relationship has been overlooked because it is never really thematized by Heidegger in any of his writings, even though it is so pervasive and so fundamental to his thought. The question of the relation between them is not contained in whether each comports himself to the whole of philosophy through their understanding of history (each of them does, in a way that is decisive for their thinking), but how. Moreover, because so many commentators have assumed that the ‘history of philosophy’ is the progressive development of a conversation between philosophers, this how has all too often been mistaken for how they might address each other, rather than how each is constituted as a voice in the whole of philosophy’s unfolding. It is this ‘being-constituted’ in its unfolding that is the making-manifest of philosophy’s history. For Hegel, as much as for Heidegger, the ‘history of philosophy’ is not the manner in which philosophy ‘appears’ as an element of history, but is history as such, itself. Heidegger’s departure point – we might almost say for everything that came after his initial studies – was Hegel’s thought, in a way that has, again, been too little understood and too much ignored. After Heidegger’s habilitation 187

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thesis was accepted at the University of Freiburg,3 Heidegger added to it a programmatic conclusion which explained the relationship of the thesis to the task he saw for future philosophical thought. Heidegger concludes that what lies ahead is the ‘massive task of a fundamental confrontation’ with a system which, as a world-view is so rich and profound that it has taken up into itself all prior motivations of philosophy – a confrontation (and these are the last words of the entire text of the thesis) ‘with Hegel’.4 Heidegger understands the confrontation with Hegel’s system as a confrontation with the way in which, after Hegel, the historical character of philosophy comes to be visible. If, hitherto, philosophy had been understood to be that discipline which dealt with the unchanging, with the ἀεί, the ‘always’ and ‘ever’ and so eternal, does this mean that within philosophy we now also account for history? Or rather, as Heidegger explains, the manner in which the philosophy of the Greeks appears within the field of vision of his own philosophy, ‘with the name “the Greeks” we think of the commencement of philosophy; with the name “Hegel”, of its fulfillment’.5 We no longer see the whole of philosophy through the ‘eternal’ principles which it establishes and makes valid, but rather, philosophy is visible as historical at the point where it is completed, and where this history as a whole can be seen for the first time. Hegel’s thought is the fulfilment of the history of philosophy as a philosophy of subjectivity, and as a thinking that had its inception with the Greeks. As the fulfilment of this thinking of subjectivity, namely absolute subjectivity, it is also the fulfilment of that thinking which is a final objectification of what it thinks, since ‘subjects’ posit ‘objects’, and the thought of absolute subjectivity posits a thought of final objectivity. It would require a full-length treatment of this objectification to show how it manifests itself in the various forms Hegel assigns to it (especially in the work he called his ‘Logic’, completed only in 1831, the year of his death):6 as what Hegel calls reality (Wirklichkeit), or that which is ‘worked out’ in the modes of production; exteriorized (entäußert) in the movement of thought itself; and so occurs as a thing alienated (entfremdet) from thought and left behind in its ongoing movement; all as the product of the movement of subjective thought (Geist) – and finally as full, complete (sublated), absolute, objectification (Vergegenständlichung) of thought itself. This movement, as the realization of absolute subjectivity, is itself the production of history as a human production. By just presenting in even the most condensed form the central categories of Hegel’s thought, it becomes easy to see why there was in Heidegger no systematic engagement with Karl Marx: Heidegger understood the thought of Marx (in whose earlier thought so many of Hegel’s categories are taken over almost without modification, despite Marx’s apparent hostility to Hegel) as the practical outworking of the completion of the metaphysics that Hegel had accomplished. In Marx, a fundamentally Hegelian Marx, Heidegger argued,



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something in itself historical was achieved: ‘the most extreme possibility of philosophy is attained’.7 This extreme possibility Heidegger also named as the most extreme nihilism, indicating the affinities he saw between Hegel’s, Marx’s and Nietzsche’s thought. It is possible to trace how Heidegger saw these affinities only with considerable perspicacity, piecing together Heidegger’s various engagements with Hegel, his much more structured and systematic engagement with Nietzsche, and comparing this with his fragmentary commentary on Marx. All of this is in material scattered across more than thirty years of Heidegger’s writings. Such a piecing-together is a herculean task, and precisely because the evidence is so scattered, we are apt to forget that what unifies this material was a consistent field of understanding which constituted Heidegger’s thought at least from 1936 up until the end. It is only with this unity in mind that we can effectively interpret what is increasingly being referred to as Heidegger’s Nachlaß, the numerous volumes of his collected writings, published only posthumously, that include the ‘Das Ereignis’ notebooks of the years 1936– 1948 and the now infamous Black Notebooks of 1931–1949.8 Heidegger understood the completion of philosophy, realized in Hegel’s thought, to be a historical event in itself. The commencement that set out from the Greeks across the whole of history and across the whole face of the globe as the ‘politics’ and economic activity of the West came to be the prevailing manner of political organization and economic activity in what we have come to call ‘globalization’. What is accomplished in the thought of Hegel is something essentially technological: it is for Heidegger the position of the most extreme nihilism, and at the same, the moment when (and here Heidegger quotes Marx directly) ‘man would be the highest being for man’.9 This technological accomplishment is the moment when the merely productive (which means bringing things about on the basis of what Heidegger referred to in his discussion of the Greek understanding of technē) becomes self-productive: production (technē) as the only intelligible ground for understanding the advance and passage of history itself. Heidegger understood his own thought to be a commencement of a different kind: a commencement that also set off from the original commencement given in the Greeks, that also lets the field of vision of the Greeks be experienced all over again, but in which the objectification of thought is to be overcome for the sake of something else. This something else is also only possible historically, as what comes after (which in German would be denoted by the preposition nach), and yet still follows (once again, nach) the very historical event that made this following thought possible. Heidegger also describes this in relation to Hegel. He says that in Hegel ‘being is the essence of time – being, that is, qua infinity’ in contrast, in Heidegger’s own thinking, ‘the essence of being is time . . . is the exact opposite of what Hegel sought to demonstrate in his whole philosophy’.10

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The word for ‘opposite’ here – Gegenteil – means literally ‘counter-part’. A counterpart is not only an opposite, it is at the same what belongs with what it stands counter to: when we describe someone as ‘my counterpart’, we can mean ‘my colleague’ and mean one who complements me in a task or a role: my ‘opposite number’. Heidegger’s thought is what comes after (nach) philosophy: pursues it, precedes it, and succeeds it. After philosophy, is a thinking: the thinking of being. An ever-present danger in understanding Heidegger’s relation to Hegel’s thought is, therefore, to reduce the discursive confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) as between ‘Heidegger’ on the one hand and ‘Hegel’ on the other. Academic discourse constantly tends in this direction – to set thinker against thinker: two boxers in a ring, on whom we bystanders may place our bets. Hegel’s philosophy ‘thinks’ in one direction, and Heidegger’s ‘thought’, after philosophy, is its reversal. To think in this way would be to miss entirely what Heidegger is attempting to name. The confrontation is not between the thinkers, but with the whole of history, the whole of philosophy, the whole of thought hitherto (which, we have seen, Heidegger saw summed up in Hegel), through a return to its origin and through understanding and uncovering the meaning of its having been accomplished, a confrontation that lets us think ‘all over again’, and at the same, ‘completely anew’. The ambiguities suggested by these two phrases are exactly the ambiguities Heidegger draws our attention to. Frequently, in his lectures, Heidegger reminded his students that ‘up until this hour’ the question before them – most often the question of being in its history, the whole of its history, had never adequately been thought. We have a tendency to hear this as a judgment, as an admission of historical failure. Heidegger means it as the setting of a horizon: the horizon of being from out of which we take ourselves. This horizon is not a limit, but the moment when thinking experiences the extent and depth of its first freedom. Heidegger understood his task as a thinker to allow the field of vision of the earliest thinkers, of the origins of thought itself, inform the horizon that this ‘up until this hour’ was meant to name and bring before us. The confrontation, the discursive Auseinandersetzung at hand, is never, for Heidegger, with or between thinkers, but with the whole history of being itself: it lets us see what has hitherto been occluded. All at once we see, and we see what has been hidden. That which we see as having been hidden is a moment of truth (ἀ-λήθεια, that which is brought out of concealment into unconcealment). For Heidegger, Hegel is that one who, bringing metaphysics and philosophy in its history to a completion and fulfilment, has the power to let this confrontation with the whole unfold. An ever-present danger, for Heidegger, is the demand to think historically: to think what is given to be thought, what lies before us for thinking.



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It is in this manner that Heidegger attempts to enter into a conversation with all those with whom he is in dialogue: even with us, here, now. Heidegger understands the confrontation to be one with what Hegel had accomplished: the fulfilment and end of philosophy. In that thinking, a thinking which thinks absolute subjectivity and absolute objectification, an absolute objectivity appears through which we have finally become estranged. This thinking is a certain kind of global thinking: that thinking which can think world as a technological object. Heidegger puts this extremely well in his interview with the Spiegel journal, conducted in 1966 and published the day after he died in 1976. Here he describes how everything which is achieved through the essence of technology ‘functions’. He proceeds: ‘It all functions. That is precisely what is uncanny, that it functions and that the functioning drives us ever further to a further functioning and that technology itself tears people away and uproots them ever more from the earth’. Heidegger shows us how this extreme uprooting – he relates it to the success of production itself – produces an object: the technologically manipulable object of the globe itself: ‘I don’t know if you were frightened, I was certainly frightened when I saw those takes from the moon of the earth. We don’t need any atomic bombs, the uprooting of humanity is already here’.11 Heidegger poses an absolute question here: does thinking think globally, by which we mean universally? By universally, Heidegger means, that at one and the same time thinking can think the whole of being, and can think the particular being, and this thinkingtogether is a universal thinking. Or does thinking think the global through the object: the image and representation of the universal, the fixity and positing of the universal? If Heidegger’s remark about the pictures of the earth from the moon is all too well known and rehearsed, the remarks that precede are less well understood and deserve attention. They too, concern Hegel; above all exemplified in the Hegelian Marx – but their significance could easily be missed, since Hegel’s name is not mentioned (let alone Marx’s). Heidegger’s history of being as the way in which philosophy accomplishes its history has been well described and examined by a multitude of commentators. This history, however, culminated in Hegel in a way that did not restrict it to what is ordinarily understood only as philosophy. The completion and fulfilment of metaphysics is not only a philosophical one. It is, in a certain sense, not only philosophical but theological as well. And this combining of the philosophical and the theological is not only another claim to the abstractly universal (a thinking that can think not only the whole of being – universal and particular – together, but can think the whole of being together with that entirety we call God) but is also a historical claim. In metaphysics, the theological and the philosophical became combined. Heidegger’s engagement with Hegel sought to show how in Hegel this reached a historical pinnacle, an absolute level, and

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how, by pursuing the history of this emergence as a history of metaphysics down to its very roots, the question of being and the question of God could once again be set apart. The completion of the history of metaphysics does not only lead to an overcoming, an Überwindung, but an un-winding, an undoing of metaphysics. The question of technology arose in the Spiegel interview arose because of something the interviewer reminded Heidegger he had spoken about in the years after the Second World War. Part of this concerned what Heidegger had called ‘the politically expressed Christian worldview’, and the other political world views that competed with it, all of which Heidegger had called ‘halfmeasures’.12 History itself, the history of the twentieth century through which Heidegger had been living, had shattered the public outworking of competing metaphysical views of the world – ‘the Christian worldview’; ‘democracy’; ‘Bolshevism’; ‘the Communist movement’; ‘fascism’; ‘Americanism’ – Heidegger had used all these terms at various points – into halves, each of which could accomplish something, but each of which was only a ‘half-ness’, a ‘half-measure’. History itself had, at least Heidegger thought, exhausted the variety of the political expressions of the age, and revealed them as incomplete. The interviewer made one last attempt to draw Heidegger into saying what political system or arrangement measures up to, and was best for, the times. This was not an innocent quest. Heidegger would have none of it, and turned the question back on the interviewer: first we would have to clarify ‘what “time” means here’.13 The Spiegel interviewer could be forgiven for not realizing that for Heidegger every available political arrangement of the times (including Nazism) arose metaphysically on the basis of what he had called Hegel’s ‘liberalism’:14 the demand to know what time means, is the demand to overcome through questioning itself, the meaning of being: it returns us to the very confrontation we have seen that Heidegger named in relation to Hegel. Hegel’s thought was the accomplishment of a unification of two intertwining strands of the same history, that had constantly fused and come apart through historical, political, events themselves: the history of the fulfilment of philosophy and the history of its intersection with the theological – exemplified in Christianity, but in its origins Hebrew and Jewish, and in which Islam had also played a central, if less well understood, role. That role, as we shall see, was not unknown to Heidegger. We might call the whole of this tradition Abrahamic. The fusion of these strands in Hegel, Heidegger tells us more than once, cannot be ignored: Heidegger reminds us that any revival of Hegel’s philosophy cannot occur by shoving aside his Christianity ‘with a wink of the eye and an accompanying sad little laugh’.15 No clever, ‘rational’ disdain for the historical presence of Abrahamic religion will suffice to excise



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from what Heidegger knows as metaphysics the religion that also marks and shapes the history that it is. Geist, Spirit, in Hegel (Heidegger argues) means: knowledge; the I; God; and the whole of extant being. Geist means each, and all, of these, in one. It was to explain all this that Heidegger coined the term ‘onto-theo-ego-logy’, which he truncated as ‘ontotheology’.16 This religious, Abrahamic, strand in Hegel, during the Nazi period Heidegger came more sharply to name as Jewish (driving it back to its very roots), and in the same period subsumed the Bolshevism of Stalin’s Russia under this Abrahamic mantle.17 This naming of the Abrahamic as Jewish never appears in any of the work published in Heidegger’s lifetime: it appears only as an inference, and only in the private notebooks I have already mentioned. If Heidegger’s confrontation with the history of philosophical thought has been told repeatedly, including by himself, all the way back to the Greeks, his confrontation with Abrahamic religion, while often alluded to and hinted at, lacks such clear and systematic description. However, the history of metaphysics, as a history of philosophy, was also a religious, and a political history (Heidegger even goes so far as to say that the dogma of the divine trinity ‘remains unthinkable without ancient metaphysics’):18 this whole, that in its most extreme, nihilistic form, could ‘take’ the earth as an en-framed image, is the history of being entire: up until this very hour. This entails a confrontation with the entire Hegel: Hegel the ‘philosopher’; the metaphysician; the inheritor of the field of vision of the Greeks – and Hegel the ‘theologian’; the progenitor of Bolshevism; the historical Christian; and so the inheritor of the outlook of the Jews. THE BLACK NOTEBOOKS In 1949 Karl Jaspers, whose friendship with Heidegger is well known through their exchanges of letters and other reports, republished his major work of Nietzsche interpretation, which he had first published under the Nazis, having written it in 1934 and 1935. Jaspers found himself and his family directly threatened by the murderous regime: his wife was Jewish. He had also been directly responsible for what happened to Heidegger after the war: it was he who intervened in Heidegger’s denazification process in 1946, with the result that Heidegger was banned from teaching in the University of Freiburg until the winter semester of 1950–1951. It is in a letter to Jaspers of about the same time as the Nietzsche republication that Heidegger admitted that he ceased to come to their house in the Nazi years, not because his wife was Jewish (in a later letter Jaspers says he and his wife never suspected as such) but because ‘I simply felt ashamed’.19

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In the Preface to the 1949 edition of his Nietzsche book Jaspers notes his original plan to have included a chapter illustrating from Nietzsche’s own words errors he had made from an extreme naturalistic viewpoint – the suggestion (from earlier comments) is that at least some of this material concerned the Jews, although Jaspers conceals this, preferring to remind his readers of Nietzsche’s sympathetic comments concerning the Jews. Jasper’s conclusion is worth citing at length: The result was devastating, and I omitted it out of respect for Nietzsche. When one reaches the kind of understanding which this book is intended to provide, such aberrations are seen to amount to nothing. Anyone who takes these passages seriously, points them out, or even goes so far as to be ensnared and guided by them has neither the maturity nor the right to read Nietzsche. The essence of his life and thought is so utterly magnificent that he who is able to participate in it is proof against the errors to which Nietzsche momentarily fell victim and which at a later date could provide phraseological materials to be used by the National Socialists in support of their inhuman deeds. Since Nietzsche could not really become the philosopher of the National Socialists, they eventually abandoned him without further ado.20

Already, in 1949, Jaspers spoke from a different age. In 1961, the German Jesuit theologian Erich Przywara published in French an article entitled ‘Husserl and Heidegger’ in which he made reference to Karl Löwith’s denunciations of Heidegger, and ‘above all the turn from “being as God” to “God as being” ’.21 The English translation contains important sections that were not released in 1961: here Przywara claims, even while acknowledging the confrontation between Heidegger and ‘the cultural politics of National Socialism’ that ‘the opposition between the master Husserl, and the student and disciple, Heidegger, even reached the point that Heidegger, the National Socialist, flatly refused any help to the venerable master (as a half-Jew) or to his family’.22 Przywara concludes by noting a kind of ‘nouveau dadaïsme’ that clung to Heidegger’s discussants, that corresponds to the style and strands of thought of Heidegger’s work itself.23 The accusation of Dadaism, to which we will have to return, allows Przywara to place, right at the beginning of his consideration of Heidegger’s thought, an accusation of irresponsibility in thinking. This neo-Dadaism is a sign of the dissolution and dissoluteness (he speaks of disintegration) of the thinker of the end and ‘final hour’ of German philosophy. Przywara raises, as early as 1961 (although the issues had come to the fore through Karl Löwith even in 1946),24 all the issues that have resurfaced in recent months with the publications of the volumes of Heidegger’s Überlegungen and Anmerkungen – the Black Notebooks, while naming in these issues a kind of devastation. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, the overall editor of Heidegger’s collected works or Gesamtausgabe, has pointed out that within 1,250 pages of



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text there are to be found thirteen passages, most of which consists of one, two, or at most three sentences, and in only one case five, that contain material which is capable of being construed as anti-Semitic.25 Nevertheless a fundamental question has once again been raised over the entirety and integrity of Heidegger’s oeuvre. Peter Trawny, the editor for the publication of the Black Notebooks, has argued that ‘the wider question arises of whether and to what extent anti-Semitism contaminates [Heidegger’s] philosophy as a whole’.26 Trawny claims to have found within the pages of the Notebooks ‘three differentiated, internally coherent types of a being-historical anti-Semitism’.27 In the midst of what will, and should, be a long debate, there is only a little I can say here. At most, I want to open up a question, a question posed to some extent, but not answered, by several of the editors of the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe when coming to terms with the questions raised by Trawny (and the manner in which he has raised them). Before uttering another word, however, it is necessary to say the following. All thinking: all thinking after 1945, after the defeat of Hitler and the National Socialist regime must necessarily take place in the shadow of the Shoah. The singularity, and the scale of the criminality that was unfolded – from the enacting of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service of 7 April 1933, until the liberations of Buchenwald and Sztotowo (Stutthof) by the 11 April 1945 – to borrow a phrase of Heidegger’s himself –, cannot be got around.28 Cannot be got around means: cannot and must not be erased, or minimized in its significance, or manipulated into something other. Finding our way into what was unfolded by the Nazi regime in those years – letting the event of the Shoah stand for itself – is an as yet incomplete event. But if it is pre-eminent, the Shoah is not alone among the crimes of the twentieth century, let alone the crimes of our own. The crimes of Stalinism, of Maoism, of fascism, of even the Allied Powers in two world wars, consisting at times of the systematic expropriation, expulsion, and dispossession of peoples across Europe and Eurasia, from 1915 to 1918, in 1919, and again in the period 1944 to 1950 stand as yet incomplete events. Ray Douglas, who has documented some of these crimes, has cautioned that ‘no legitimate comparison can be drawn between [these crimes] and the appalling record of German offences against Jews and other innocent victims between 1939 and 1945. The extent of Nazi criminality and barbarity in central and eastern Europe is on a scale and of a degree that is almost impossible to overstate’. He adds ‘in the entire span of human history, nothing can be found to surpass it, nor, with the possible exception of recent revelations about Mao’s China, to equal it’.29 Nor, as he notes, do any of these crimes – including those at worst sponsored, or otherwise not resisted or prevented, by Western states, ‘counterbalance each other’. The prosperity and post-war peace not a few of us have enjoyed came at a price. Frank Dikötter, having trawled the archives of the Chinese Communist Party itself to establish the evidence, has shown

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how in Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ alone (let alone the events that preceded it and the Cultural Revolution that followed) ‘coercion, terror and systematic violence were the foundation’.30 Nor was this simply the effect of mismanagement or neglect: millions of victims were murdered by torture, summary execution and deliberate starvation. Dikötter has also shown the extent to which the discourse of race played a role in the formation of republican and Communist China.31 To these the crimes of East Asia, and those still unfolding in North Korea must at the very least be added. Each of these crimes is European: which means, they arise within populations that share common or related histories, destinies (especially economic ones), or languages with European populations, and who have co-existed with each other for at the least for centuries. The history of the United States, the history of modern China, the history of contemporary Islam – all of these, and many others besides, arise on the basis of a colonization, an economics, a form of religious life, a metaphysics, much or all of whose origins lie in what we understand by the name ‘Europe’. This is in contrast to those other European crimes, of rapine, colonization and devastation where populations were suborned or even eradicated on the basis of territorial expansion to found the wider reach of the West. Each of these crimes is a history – which means not merely that they possess the history of their having happened, but there has been a history of their reception and comprehension (or lack and refusal of it): many remain at best only partially acknowledged; some at worst, still celebrated; and all at the very least, cut across by diverse and not always immediately decipherable competing historical, even ideological, claims. It can still be considered a crime in Turkey to speak of an Armenian genocide, even as it is a crime in other territories to deny the fact of that same event. Of all of these, the fact and the immensity of the Shoah continues to be the least contested. It above all, cannot, and is not, to be got around. INTERPRETATIONS AND MISINTERPRETATIONS Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, from the outset and up until now still, the overall editor of the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe, observes that the Black Notebooks must not be read in the same way as Heidegger’s expressly philosophical works. Trawny’s lugubrious innuendos about Heidegger’s contempt for the public, or his attempt to draw a distinction between an esoteric and an exoteric Heidegger play with exquisite delicacy on the prejudices of hostile audiences, but they are poor keys to the volumes of the Gesamtausgabe itself. There is indeed, as Trawny has suggested, an exoteric Heidegger – Being and Time, the book Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, the volumes of essays, lectures and speeches, the two edited volumes of the Nietzsche material, all



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published during Heidegger’s life: and there is an esoteric Heidegger, beginning above all with the Contributions to Philosophy and its place as the first in what von Herrmann has entitled the (seven) Das Ereignis volumes of Heidegger’s own adventure on the paths of thought. But Trawny himself forgets, in his claim that ‘Heidegger denied the public every right to be able to think through philosophical problems of significance’,32 that the first presentation of the supposedly esoteric Heidegger, the Heidegger that actually sought to think through the present place of ‘being’ in the Hesperian, evening (Abend)land, of the twilight of the West, was laid out before an entirely non-academic and public audience in Bremen in 1949.33 It was this audience to whom he had intended to speak of the Shoah, through cryptic references to ‘the fabrication of corpses . . . unobtrusively liquidated in annihilation camps’,34 as if anyone there would or could have doubted for a moment to what he might have been referring. Even if this statement, it appears, was held back in Bremen itself, it circulated nevertheless, and was reported widely (especially by Heidegger’s accusers, the same ones who denounced him for having refused ever to speak of the Shoah) long before it was ever officially published. As I have argued elsewhere, the audience Heidegger understood to be incapable of thinking through questions of significance was not the public, but academics – the researchers, teachers and professors in the universities – to whom he spoke only ‘in the language of metaphysics’, while holding the other (esoteric) language back.35 The Black Notebooks belong to a third region of Heidegger’s oeuvre, beyond even the ‘esoteric’; more uneven (and much of the Das Ereignis material is uneven enough), a vast quantity of aphoristic and truncated writing comprising something akin to Nietzsche’s Nachlaß. The Black Notebooks are only a fraction of this material. These notes – sometimes mere jottings, at times so private as to be incoherent except to the writer himself – can be read only as a commentary and background to the rest. In reading it, and understanding it (assuming we are even always equipped to do so), a great deal of deliberative maturity is required: much of it is experimental. This material, including the Black Notebooks, has to be interpreted. It can never merely be read. The criminality, and the planetary drive for it, whose spectre I raised earlier was not left unremarked by Heidegger, in a place that is at the same time a site of one of Peter Trawny’s most serious suggestions that Heidegger’s antiSemitism is subject to a kind of concealment. For if the Black Notebooks are not necessarily to be understood as Heidegger’s most primary philosophical texts, Trawny has edited others that are. One of these was published in 1998 from notebooks written between 1938 and 1940. Here Heidegger speaks of ‘the planetary master-criminals of the most contemporary modernity’, in a text where he more than once denounces the totalizing drive for war as part of

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that criminal unleashing. A sentence of Heidegger’s that did not appear in his brother Fritz Heidegger’s transcript of the notebook, but is in the manuscript at this point in the text, reads (according to Trawny) as follows: ‘ “The question remains”, however, “what is the basis for the peculiar predetermination of Jewry for planetary criminality” ’.36 Trawny suggests that the most likely meaning of this question is that it asks why the Jews have become victims of planetary criminality, and so the objects of the criminality of others, but he adds that it could be susceptible of being read to say that the Jews themselves were master-criminals. Except that in the context, this claim is absurd – and in fact neither of the interpretations Trawny offers makes the slightest sense: for the context is not just the text of Heidegger’s manuscript itself, which at that very point makes it clear enough that the master-criminals are the despots of totalitarianism (he uses the same term Verbrecher, criminal, and Hauptverbrecher, master-criminal, to describe them), but the context must also be the history of the war-time period in which it was written. Nazi billboards had in 1938 – contemporaneously with Heidegger’s text – proclaimed the libel ‘Judaism is Criminality’, with reference to a September 1937 edition of Julius Streicher’s biliously anti-Semitic tabloid newspaper Der Stürmer,37 which specialized in vulgar, obscene and often highly sexualized denunciations especially of Jews, but also Catholics and various other ‘enemies of the Third Reich’.38 In the Germany of the time, deluged with a Nazi propaganda denouncing Jews through every organ available to them as plotting and scheming across the planet for the downfall of Hitler’s Third Reich, Heidegger’s point is ironic: part of the planetary criminality being enacted is the very denouncing of the victims of this criminality as if they were themselves its instigators – a procedure familiar to every propagandist right up to the present day. Scholars of the Nazi period, and especially of anti-Semitism and the Shoah, its origins, causes, and unfolding, have taken great pains to situate, examine and understand the context and circumstances of the events themselves. It is possible to see why, taken out of its context, this remark could be read ambiguously: given the background, set against Heidegger’s startling clarity on who the actual criminals are, his irony becomes clear. However, and in the light of the very severity of the crimes themselves, the solution suggested by those who have sought to defend Heidegger – von Herrmann especially – to the problem of the Black Notebooks should also not satisfy us. Von Herrmann is exemplary, but not alone among older Heidegger scholars, in defending Heidegger against the latest round of his detractors, arguing (and citing István Fehér in doing so) that with respect to the question of the truth of being, ‘we must stress that these thirteen [anti-Semitic] passages are philosophically inconsequential’.39 To brush Heidegger’s remarks to one side in this way is too easy, however: the remarks still must be understood and interpreted: they cannot be got around.



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It should go without saying, but I will say it anyway and for the avoidance of every doubt: that especially in light of the crimes that were committed by the Nazis, especially against, most singularly, but not solely, those the Nazis racially defined as Jews and half-Jews, any of Heidegger’s comments that can be shown (rather than merely suspected) to be anti-Semitic in these notebooks are without question reprehensible, and we must not be afraid to say so: and whenever, and as often as, it is necessary to do so. It is well known that Heidegger was at least for a good part of his life, capable of a casual, even neurotic, anti-Semitism.40 However, Heidegger’s political engagement with Nazism was itself, certainly initially, an attempt to understand our being ordered one to the other within the history of the West. And if there is no human essence, no subjectivity of the subject, and Heidegger certainly argued that there was none, then for Heidegger there can be no essence or essences of the human being constituted on the basis of race either, which even Trawny concedes. Heidegger rejected every biologistic conception of race – especially the Nazi racial claptrap. Heidegger’s anti-Semitic remarks require further interpretation – which we do not have the time to undertake in the detail they deserve. However, not to read many of these remarks as reactive, and so written from a context, and as responding to the extraordinary situation of the Nazi period, is in itself also reprehensible. The danger for those of us who must confront Heidegger’s remarks about Jews and world-Judaism is not in not taking them seriously, but rather in not taking them seriously enough – in not holding steadfastly enough to what they do say, and steadfastly enough to what they do not: in other words, of letting ourselves be swayed by anyone who has decided in advance what these remarks must say, and by doing so have actually dismissed them without properly interpreting them. This is to say that Heidegger’s antiSemitic remarks arise on the basis of his understanding, not of the essence of the human subject, but a very specific history of existence, a very specific history of Da-sein. We are not required to undertake the identical path of interpretation of the history of existence as Heidegger undertook (we are certainly not required to parrot any anti-Semitism in order to remain authentically within the province of his thinking). But we are required to undertake – to interpret – the history of the same existence, as a history that is also our own. Existence here means ‘act’ as much as it means ‘thought’. Heidegger gives us a directive for how to proceed from the Black Notebooks, from after the war in 1946, and so when the consequences of the anti-Semitism to which he had held was perhaps becoming clear in its vast and criminally terrible breadth: ‘note for jackasses: the remark has nothing to do with “anti-Semitism” which is so foolish and so reprehensible’.41 There is one last remark of von Herrmann’s I want to draw attention to: he cites Ingeborg Schüßler to argue that Trawny’s book is simply not one of

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philosophy because it lacks any truthful concern for interpretation. How then, do we bring these questions back to a thoughtful path, a truthful concern for their interpretation, while at the same time, how do we bring ourselves into an understanding of how and why they have arisen in the way that they have? HEIDEGGER AND ‘THE JEWS’ Inasmuch as the Shoah cannot itself be got around, we must learn not to be blinded by every appearance of the word ‘Jew’ and ‘Jewish’ in Heidegger’s work as evidence of anti-Semitism. During the Nazi period, at least in his private notebooks, Heidegger more than once mocks the biological racism of the Hitler regime: ‘pure nonsense to say that experimental research is Nordic-Germanic and that contrarily rational [research] is foreign. We would then have to decide to count Newton and Leibniz among “the Jews” ’.42 This remark reveals how so often during this period Heidegger’s remarks are reactive: responding to the ubiquitous poison of the Nazi propaganda. Before the Shoah comes about, before it comes fully to the fore as a baleful demand which each of us has, with trepidation and humility, to confront, things could be said that subsequent to it are unsayable. It is into this category that many of Heidegger’s remarks fall. In the words of his friend, the Greek erstwhile communist Kostas Axelos, Heidegger ‘was a great thinker and a narrow-minded petty bourgeois at the same time’.43 Here we release ourselves merely from thinking of ‘the psychology’ of the man Heidegger, to find our way into the question, the question which was also the matter which he has given us to think of. Given that Heidegger had entirely friendly relations with many Jews, had numerous Jewish students, a Jewish lover, disdained the racial thinking under which Jews could be delimited either in religious courts or by national state laws as Jews, and that even Trawny concedes there is in Heidegger no – as he puts it – ‘concrete ‘construct’ of the repudiated Jews’,44 what did Heidegger mean by ‘Jews’, by ‘Jewishness’, by ‘Jewry’, by Judentum and Judenschaft? First we must note the extent to which Trawny himself is unable to interpret his sources. In the English Preface to the translation of his book, Trawny rails against Heidegger’s sympathy for ‘Hölderlin’s turn of phrase “god of the gods” ’: the phrase, he sniffily notes, ‘is simply incompatible with Judaism and Christianity’.45 The phrase, as he quotes it (clumsily translated), is known to Heidegger: he discusses it towards the end of a long dialogue on Hölderlin entitled The Hesperian [Evening-Land] Conversation, composed between 1946 and 1948.46 Hölderlin’s actual phrase was full of ambiguity and cleverness: ‘der Götter Gott’: at once ‘of the gods, God’ and then ‘the God of gods’, this latter an accurate rendering of the Hebrew, Greek and



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Latin by which this phrase has been known for millennia.47 It is, in other words, a quote, in fact a text for use in worship: from four of the psalms and two other places in the Hebrew Bible, known also to Christians as the Old Testament in both Hebrew, and the Greek of the Septuagint:48 let alone that it litters the texts of Jewish and Christian Pseudepigrapha. Even as Hölderlin and Heidegger are not using this phrase in a specifically Jewish or Christian way, they are quoting scripture common to, and commonly known to, both Jews and Christians. And they know what they are doing: both were trained in Christian seminaries. The breadth of Heidegger’s thought at its best is global in its reach, at its worst, narrow and rather than ‘historical’, is cramped and constrained to its historical place. Trawny, however, is also limited, by a kind of devastation, a crudity of interpretation, which finds in Heidegger the limitations it wants to find, ignorant of what it does not know in the face of Heidegger’s wider knowledge. We do not have space to delve into the fateful path for Germany suggested by Heidegger when he employs this biblical quote from Hölderlin: we do not have the time for the examination of the double-destiny of Germany under God explored by Herder, or Heidegger’s view of it,49 or Hegel’s reformulation of Herder’s insight, reported by Eduard Gans, Hegel’s Jewish disciple: ‘the state is Geist itself, which exists in the world and realizes itself as such through consciousness . . . it is the path of God through the world . . . the force of reason actualizing itself as will’.50 This side of the question, the question of who the god is, that highest or latest God, whom Heidegger named, and how this God relates to and is distanced from the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jesus, and how this God stands with the gods and goddesses of antiquity: all this is contained in Heidegger’s thought (and not as any kind of faith). We can only at the very briefest, allude to Heidegger’s naming of the devastation, a devastation which will be all the more decisive, all the more devastating, not (as Jünger had thought) in the immediate wake of just-ceased war, but now: ‘the devastation has dominion then, and exactly then, when nation and people have not been struck by the destruction of war itself’.51 We now dwell within this ‘then’: this is our hour. When Heidegger speaks of God, he speaks, as Hölderlin suggests, of ‘the last God’ – the penultimate section of the Contributions to Philosophy takes this as a title. Such a God is not last in succession, but indicates that other meaning das Letzte in German, ‘the latest’. The ‘latest’, even in English, can allude both to the one yet to come, and the one most recently departed. Both meanings are indicated for Heidegger: we await a God to come; we live in the shadow of Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God. Such a God is a horizon, which situates us, either before or after it: ‘up until this hour’; ‘from this hour forth’. Heidegger frees this last God from history, both philosophically and theologically, to be the God that shows itself, rather than the God whose character

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and even being is already decided in advance of the god’s appearing – either by the philosophers or the theologians. This last God, should it arrive at all, comes to us from the future, as the Homeric gods arrive – unannounced, anonymously, recognized only after the event: un-Abrahamic.52 It is well known that for Heidegger ‘the Jews’ were at the same the Bolsheviks, and Marx, and at the same, and especially during his acute confrontation with Christianity in the 1930s, worked out through the pages of the Black Notebooks as Trawny observes but lacks any understanding to decipher, Christianity itself. This tangle of connections is made, as we have seen, in rapid-fire in the pages of the Contributions to Philosophy.53 This was Heidegger’s petty-bourgeois shorthand for what he more seriously, and in numerous places, named as the appropriation of Greek thought, above all of Aristotle, by later thinkers (in fact from the sixth-century Philoponus the Alexandrian onwards, although Heidegger does not name him explicitly), an appropriation which, he said, was ‘completely un-Greek’ and ‘arose through the Arabic-Jewish and Christian philosophy’,54 in a Mediaeval tradition stretched over centuries that forged the most radical monotheism even out of a concept of the God of gods. Heidegger makes frequent reference to this Islamic-Jewish-Christian tradition, to which he counterposes the ‘other beginning’ which is at one and the same time a re-appropriation of the ‘first beginning’ with the (pre-Socratic) Greeks, and a confrontation at the deepest level with the completion of metaphysics represented by Hegel, Nietzsche and Marx. Nowhere is this more clearly explained than in his description of the history of being as a confrontation with Hegel, in the lecture course given in the summer semester of 1933, when Heidegger was at his most energetic as a supporter of Hitlerism. In Hegel and in the Marxism that he had made possible Heidegger saw the taking over into human hands the god of creativity and production: he said as much, not once but repeatedly. Production, ‘which today means the only and final reality – formerly this was called God’.55 This is because he understood the movement of National Socialism as a confrontation with Hegel, or rather with Hegel’s metaphysics as a practice, namely above all in Bolshevism, but also in what he and others called Americanism. The Christian Hegel, the Hegel of absolute subjectivity, was, for Heidegger, ‘the Jew’. Hegel’s was the Christian, Bolshevist, Americanist, metaphysics of production: Judentum. We can and should not now ever speak like this: but this does not mean we are unable to reach back, to understand, and to interpret what was then being said. Moreover, arguments often closely paralleling the connections Heidegger was attempting to illustrate can, and have been, made by numerous scholars without recourse to anti-Semitic terminology or slurs.56 In this respect a further point demands at least to be considered: that in several places where Heidegger repeats what presents itself to us now as the unmistakeable



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apparatus of anti-Semitism, the terms were ones either taken up or invented by the Nazis, and were deployed by Heidegger to show the extent to which Nazism itself is to be situated within a wider narrative – in Heidegger’s case a wider interpretation of the history of being (a history both philosophical and theological). This is entirely consistent with what appears to have been Heidegger’s firmly held view, arguably as early as 1935 (in relation to figures like Carl Schmitt) and certainly by 1946, that Nazism itself was a form of liberalism.57 It remains to be shown – indeed it has not been shown so far – that Heidegger maintained the use of this kind of language after 1945 (or indeed that he had resorted to it much before 1933): at the very least the inference has to be that the use of this language derived from the precise period in which it was more widely current socially and politically. This does not make the use of the language in any way less reprehensible or more justifiable, but it does require that we have an understanding and interpretation of the context of its use, and so its very history, especially by Heidegger himself. It does not follow, and it has not been adequately shown that it does follow, that Heidegger, when taking up this language, does so with simple approbation, devoid of irony. Trawny concludes by conceding that to speak of a being-historical antiSemitism does not imply that being-historical thinking itself and as such is anti-Semitic:58 he even goes so far as to congratulate himself that ‘the upheaval’ of the latest Heidegger controversy ‘brings more good with it than bad’. Trawny’s book is itself marked by a kind of Dadaism, a devastating literalism of interpretation that detaches the Black Notebooks from their historical context: for just one example of many, Trawny argues (with not a shred of evidence) that Heidegger must have known during the Nazi period what took place in the death camps. He concludes ‘thus it can never entirely be excluded that [Heidegger] held violence against Jews as necessary’.59 This is tantamount to Emmanuel Faye’s suggestion that Heidegger’s rhetorical question concerning those who died in extermination camps – ‘did they die?’ – amounts to a kind of Holocaust-denial.60 CONCLUSION It would be true to say that much – too much – contemporary academic discourse, is characterized by a certain Dadaism, by the way in which the capacity to shock and drain of irony statements made ironically and unshockingly in other places and at other times has made for good books, good papers, good arguments, and has even laid the basis for good careers. The everyday practice of deconstruction, of ‘reading against’, has been a good business in all academic circles in the humanities and even the social sciences. What is

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Dadaism? Heidegger himself described it, the first of the Black Notebooks, right after the disastrous adventure of the Rectorate, as ‘bringing being itself to the word: Dadaism’: but it is clear from what follows that Heidegger was dismayed: he goes on to say ‘where are we, if this becomes possible and this “concept” of philosophy determines the construction of “German culture”?’.61 Yet Dadaism, as Heidegger recognized, is a form of philosophical thinking, that philosophical thinking that Heidegger describes in the very same place, and under the heading ‘Philosophy: setting within the word the essencing of being’.62 In other words, Dadaism is how being itself now unfolds the beings that surround us. Dadaism itself made no different claim. ‘Philosophy’ here is understood as the contrary to thought: it is not thought, but style, a mode – an irony – of thinking. Thought alone, and as such, without posturing, penetrates through to things as they are, to what is.63 The question is how being eventuates itself in the word. Dadaism, as a productive form of negation, seizes upon the everyday, and, draining it of every aspect of irony, tears the everyday out of its everydayness into a transcendent otherness that shows up the everyday, now detached from every possible ordinariness and utterly defamiliarized in every aspect, as the most effective and grand-scale form of the sublime. It transforms the everyday through shock – through the sheer reduplicative effect of shock – into the absolute, the absolutely transcendent other. This is none other than the attempt to produce the new, the genuinely futural, from out of what is available to us as the most immediately graspable – that which lies most proximately at hand – and so what already ‘is’, and therefore already ‘was’, and so has already been: the most shockingly novel future is constructed from out of the most immediately recognizable elements of the past. This is the fundamental negation at the heart of Western metaphysics: it is the power Kant had identified as the negativity implicit in the subjective production of the transcendent, in the sublime.64 Hegel describes this movement of negation (Aufhebung) as the ‘reproductive imagination’,65 the completion and fulfilment of a self-demonstration (Selbstanschauung): ‘This imaging of [Geist’s] self-demonstration is subjective, the moment of existence is yet lacking’.66 This Dadaism of thought is, for Heidegger, the terminus of Hegel’s metaphysics: the point when the future is merely the banal rearrangement of the possibilities thrown up by the past. Such a future deprives the world of its significance, by making any point on the surface of the globe no different from any other. The world is no longer a world characterized by difference, but the universalization of pedestrian sameness. This reproductive Einbildungskraft, or power and capacity for the production of images, is in Hegel the basis for what Heidegger came (in the period of the Black Notebooks) to call ‘machination’: the materialization and ‘construction’ (the full ambiguity



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of the German verb bilden), as much image as construct, when set against Kant’s Vorstellungen: ‘representations’. It will be made to exist by a (productive) action, an exteriorization of the object as object, the production of which at the same time enacts and so produces the subjectivity of the subject. The production of the object raises the subject to a higher stage of being. Selfdemonstration – often, but poorly – translated as ‘intuition’ – is in fact not any kind of passive act of self-interpretation, but an active kind of self-knowing as self-production through self-advancement. This is the logic of the essencing of being as metaphysics. As a logic of becoming, the becoming of highest being and so absolute subjectivity, it is (for reasons we cannot consider here), what Heidegger had called ‘theo-logic’. This constant activity of negation and its material effects Heidegger understood to have a historical manifestation in an uprootedness, which, in his lectures of the 1930s he had attributed to Americanism,67 and, reprehensibly, he personified in ‘Jewishness’. His reprehensible terminology should not obscure the phenomenon itself: uprootedness is of the essence of the most contemporary forms of the modernity of the West, exported to every corner of the globe (by making every corner identical to every other) and gathered into itself. The genuinely futural is the genuinely unforeseeable, and the capacity to enter into the uniqueness and specificity of each of the places on the face of the earth, both in their history and the future they have not yet had but which is their own. This is a (non-metaphysical) globality of a very different kind, where the possibility inherent in each place can never be seized upon, calculated and predicted, and machinated into sameness. Heidegger understood that the metaphysical ‘logic’ of negation, of devastation, of absolute subjectivity as humanity-in-general, had completed itself in its most extreme form when it opened up all over again the question of existence itself, because it required a renewed enquiry into the grounding possibility on which this logic that had triumphed in Hegel had arisen. Heidegger posed this quite succinctly by arguing that ‘this ground, wherein this continued situation is grounded is the existence of man; and indeed not man-in-general but the historical man in his and her linguistic nationally and spiritually determined being-with-one-another as belonging to one another and obligated for one another’. Heidegger concludes that ‘the dominant grounding reality of this being-with-one-another is language itself’.68 And so (in exact opposition to Hegel) not the nation state as God’s path through the world (let alone a universal, equalized, humanity as species-being). It is here that we break off. For even Heidegger oscillated between describing the various phenomena that attend this enquiry into grounds (in this case the universal uprootedness of the modern age, which explains the Dadaism of modern scholarship), and the ground of every phenomenon, namely

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being-with-one-another – he oscillated between this and the proposal of ‘solutions’ to the consequences of this uprootedness: which he identified for a brief time in National Socialism and then in the ‘movement’ that underpinned it. We are required to describe the phenomenon: not to think as Heidegger thinks, but to think of what Heidegger thought of. And so we leave him with a last word, from the Black Notebooks themselves, from 1946: ‘The Phenomenology of Spirit is the end. The topology of beyng is the be-ginning. We are not dealing here with Hegel, nor with Heidegger, nor with the relationship between them both. The location of beyng is the difference’.69 NOTES 1 All translations of works cited are my own, unless otherwise noted. For this reason I have not cited or given details of English translations, where they exist, unless I have quoted the English translation. Dates given in square brackets ‘[]’ indicate the original year of publication. 2 There have been very few large-scale studies of the relationship between Hegel and Heidegger. Michael Allen Gillespie’s Hegel, Heidegger and the Ground of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015) is one; for another smaller, but powerful recent assessment, see Thomas Schwarz Wentzer, ‘Heidegger and Hegel’, in Hermeneutical Heidegger, ed. Michael Bowler and Ingo Farin (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016), 142–72. 3 Heidegger’s Habilitation was an examination of a treatise thought at the time to have been by Duns Scotus (later revealed to have been written by Thomas of Erfurt). See Martin Heidegger, ‘Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus (1916)’, in Heidegger, Frühe Schriften (GA1), ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1978), 189–411. 4 Ibid., 411. ‘Der großen Aufgabe einer prinzipiellen Auseinandersetzung . . . mit Hegel’. 5 Martin Heidegger, ‘Hegel und die Griechen (1958)’, in Wegmarken (GA9), ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976), 427–44, 427. ‘Bei dem Namen ‘die Griechen’ denken wir an den Anfang der Philosophie, bei dem Namen ‘Hegel’ an deren Vollendung’. 6 See G.W.F. Hegel, ‘Wissenschaft der Logik’, in Werke in zwanzig Bänden (Bd. 5 und 6), ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986 [1970]). 7 Martin Heidegger, ‘Seminar in Zähringen 1973’, in Seminare (GA15), ed. Curd Ochwadt (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2005 [1986]), 372–400, 387. ‘Die äußerste Möglichkeit der Philosophie [ist] erreicht. Sie ist in ihr Ende eingegangen’. 8 For a fuller account of this material, including descriptions of the volumes in question, see Laurence P. Hemming, ‘The Existence of the Black Notebooks in the Background’, in Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks 1931–1941, ed. Ingo Farin



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and Jeff Malpas (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016), 109–26. See also the further discussion that follows. 9 Heidegger, ‘Seminar in Zähringen’ (GA15), 387, citing Karl Marx, Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie. ‘Der Mensch das höchste Wesen für den Menschen sei’. 10 Martin Heidegger, Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes (GA32), ed. Ingtraud Görland (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1988), 209. ‘Das Sein ist das Wesen der Zeit, das Sein nämlich qua Unendlichkeit . . . Das Wesen des Seins ist die Zeit – ist das gerade Gegenteil von dem was Hegel in seiner ganzen Philosophie zu erweisen suchte’. 11 Martin Heidegger, ‘Spiegel-Gespräch mit Martin Heidegger (23rd September 1966)’, in Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges 1910–1976 (GA16), ed. Hermann Heidegger (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000), 652–83, 669 ff. ‘Es funktioniert alles. Das ist gerade das Unheimliche, daß es funktioniert und daß das Funktionieren immer weiter treibt zu einem weiteren Funktionieren und daß die Technik den Menschen immer mehr von der Erde losreißt und entwurzelt. Ich weiß nicht, ob Sie erschrocken sind, ich bin jedenfalls erschrocken, als ich jetzt die Aufnahmen von Mond zur Erde sah. Wir brauchen gar keine Atombombe, die Entwurzelung des Menschen ist schon da’. 12 Ibid., 668. ‘Spiegel: . . . [die] politisch ausgedrückten christlichen Weltanschauung . . . “Halbheiten” ’. 13 Ibid., 669. ‘Was hier “Zeit” bedeutet’. 14 As early as 1934, on resigning from the Rectorate of Freiburg University, Heidegger had suggested that – contrary to what Schmitt had argued, that the National Socialist State had brought Hegel’s liberalism to an end, with Hitler’s accession to power Hegel had come most fully to life. Martin Heidegger, Seminare: Hegel – Schelling (GA86), ed. Peter Trawny (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2011), 606. ‘Man hat gesagt, 1933 ist Hegel gestorben; im Gegenteil: er hat erst angefangen zu leben’. 15 Heidegger, Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes (GA32), 162. ‘Mit einem Augenzwinkern und mitleidigen Lächeln’. 16 Ibid., 182 ff. 17 See the references and juxtapositions to the relationship of the religions of Judaism and Christianity to Bolshevism, in Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (GA65), ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1989): 54, 140. 18 Heidegger, Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes (GA32), 143. ‘Ohne die antike Metaphysik undenkbar bleibt’. 19 Martin Heidegger/Karl Jaspers, Briefwechsel 1920–1963, ed. Walter Biemel and Hans Samer (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1990), 196. Letter from Heidegger of 7 March 1950: ‘Weil ich mich einfach schämte [war]’ (Heidegger’s emphasis). See letter from Jaspers of 19 March 1950. ‘Von meiner Frau und mir möchte ich Ihnen sagen, daß wir niemals angenommen haben, daß meine Frau, weil Jüdin, für Sie ein Grund war, unsere Beziehungen erlöschen zu lassen’.

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20 Karl Jaspers, ‘Vorwort zur zweiten und dritten Auflage’, in Jaspers, Nietzsche: Einführung in das Verständnis seines Philosophierens (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1981), 6. ‘Das ergab ein vernichtendes Bild. Aus Achtung vor Nietzsche habe ich es weggelassen. Wer Nietzsche versteht, wie es dieses Buch lehren möchte, für den verschwinden jene Abgleitungen in nichts. Wer jene Stellen ernst nimmt, auf sie den Finger legt oder sich gar von Ihnen fangen und führen läßt, der besitzt nicht die Reife und das Recht zur Nietzsche-Lektüre. Denn der Gehalt dieses Lebens und Denkens ist so großartig, daß, wer an ihm Teil gewinnt, geschützt ist gegen die Irrungen, denen Nietzsche für Augenblicke verfallen ist, und die sogar den Unmenschlichkeiten der Nationalsozialisten phraseologisches Material liefern konnten. Da Nietzsche in der Tat nicht der Philosoph des Nationalsozialismus werden konnte, wurde er von diesen in der Folge stillschweigend fallengelassen’. The translation is by Charles F. Wallraff and Frederick J. Schmitz from Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), xiii, ff. 21 Cf. Karl Löwith, Heidegger – Denker in dürftiger Zeit: Zur Stellung der Philosophie im 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Verlag, 1980 [1960]), esp. 193–227. Erich Przywara, ‘Husserl et Heidegger’, Les Études philosophiques 16, no. 1 (1961): 55–62, 56. ‘Surtout le retournement de ‘l’être en tant que Dieu’ et de “Dieu en tant qu’être” ’. The article was written but never published, in German: a copy of the German original was supplied to me by the kindness of Professor John Betz of the University of Notre Dame, Illinois. 22 Erich Przywara, ‘Husserl and Heidegger’, in Przywara, Analogia Entis: Metaphysics – Original Structure and Universal Rhythm, trans. John R. Betz and David Bentley Hart (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 613–22, 616. 23 Przywara, ‘Husserl et Heidegger’, 56. Przywara was an early public critic of Heidegger, and although Heidegger never commented directly on Przywara, he was aware of the criticism. See, for instance, the letter of Fritz Heidegger of March 1930 on Przywara’s discussion of Heidegger’s Kantbuch and concept of ‘the nothing’. Fritz Heidegger, letter to Martin Heidegger of 30 March 1930 in Heidegger und der Antisemitismus: Positionen in Widerstreit, ed. Walter Homolka and Arnulf Heidegger (Freiburg: Herder, 2016), 17. 24 Karl Löwith, ‘Les implications politiques de la philosophie de l’existence chez Heidegger’, Les Temps Modernes 2 (1946): 343–60. 25 Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, ‘Die Stellung von Martin Heideggers “Notizbüchern” oder “schwarzen Wachstuchheften” in seinem Gesamtwerk’, Magazzino di filosofia 25 (2015): 208–16. 26 Peter Trawny, Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2014), 12. ‘Mit ihm drängt sich die weitere Frage auf, ob und inwiefern der Antisemitismus Heideggers Philosophie als ganze kontaminiert’. Andrew Mitchell has published a fine translation of this work as



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Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015); however, all the translations of Trawny’s German are my own, unless otherwise indicated. 27 Trawny, Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung, 31. ‘Drei verschiedene in sich kohärente Typen eines seinsgeschichtlichen Antisemitismus schließen’ (Trawny’s emphasis). 28 Martin Heidegger, ‘Wissenschaft und Besinnung (1953)’, in Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze (GA7), ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000 [1954]), 37–65, 58. ‘Das Unumgängliche’. 29 R. M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 5. 30 Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), xi. 31 Frank Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (London: Hurst & Co., 1992). 32 Trawny, Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung, 98. ‘Heidegger hat der Öffentlichkeit jedes Recht abgesprochen, im Durchdenken philosophischer Probleme von Bedeutung sein zu können’. 33 Martin Heidegger, ‘Einblick in das was ist: Bremer Vorträge 1949’, in Heidegger, Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge (GA79), ed. Petra Jaeger (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1994), 3–77. 34 Martin Heidegger, ‘Die Gefahr’, in Heidegger, Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge (GA79), 56. ‘Der Fabrikation von Leichen . . . in Vernichtungslagern unauffällig liquidiert’. 35 Martin Heidegger, ‘Brief über den Humanismus (1946)’, in Heidegger, Wegmarken (GA9), 313–64, 313, note 1. ‘Der Brief spricht immer noch in der Sprache der Metaphysik, und zwar wissentlich. Die andere Sprache bleibt im Hintergrund’. See Laurence P. Hemming, Heidegger and Marx: A Productive Dialogue over the Language of Humanism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012), 62. 36 Trawny, Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung, 51. ‘Worin die eigentümliche Vorbestimmung der Judenschaft für das planetarische Verbrechertum begründet’. 37 Special edition of Die Stürmer, ‘Das Volk der Verbrecher (Judentum ist organisiertes Verbrechertum)’ (Nuremberg: September 1937). 38 ‘Judenschaft ist Verbrechertum’. See a reference to this from Michael Berkowitz, Nazism and the Myth of Jewish Criminality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), xiii, and note 2. Berkowitz references W/S #11189, CD no. 0008 of the National Archives of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. See, from the same archive, a short amateur video of 1938, Film ID: 2941 (title: Anti-Semitic Graffiti on Jewish Shops). 39 von Herrmann, ‘Die Stellung von Martin Heideggers “Notizbüchern” ’, 216. ‘Müssen wir betonen, daß jene 13 Textstellen “philosophisch belanglos” sind’. 40 Some of Heidegger’s Nazi apologetics in the early stages of the regime are contained in the Gesamtausgabe (see Heidegger, Reden und andere [GA16]), esp. 81–314. Thomas Sheehan, as one of the more reliable commentators, has documented many of Heidegger’s casually anti-Semitic remarks. See Thomas Sheehan, ‘A

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Normal Nazi’, reviews of The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, edited by Richard Wolin; and Martin Heidegger: Politik und Geschichte im Leben und Denken, by Ernst Nolte, The New York Review of Books 40, 14 January 1993, 30–35. The letters between Martin Heidegger and his brother Fritz in the first section of Walter Homolka and Arnulf Heidegger’s Heidegger und der Antisemitismus show, against the backdrop of Fritz’s incredulity, Martin Heidegger’s credulousness for at least some of the years of the Nazi period in ascribing a factual basis to the claim that there was an international conspiracy of Jews against the West. 41 Martin Heidegger, Anmerkungen I – V (GA97), ed. Peter Trawny (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2015), 159. ‘Anmerkung für Esel: mit “Antisemitismus” hat die Bemerkung nichts zu tun. Dieser ist so töricht und so verwerflich’. 42 Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (GA65), 163. ‘Der reine Blödsinn zu sagen, das experimentelle Forschen sei nordisch-germanisch und das rationale dagegen fremdartig! Wir müssen uns dann schon entschließen, Newton und Leibniz zu den “Juden” zu zählen’. 43 Kostas Axelos, ‘Mondialisation without the world: Interview with Stuart Elden’, Radical Philosophy 130 (March/April 2005): 25–28, 26. 44 Trawny, Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung, 98. ‘[Das] konkrete “Bild” des angefeindeten Juden’. 45 Peter Trawny, ‘Preface to the English Translation’, in Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), x. 46 Martin Heidegger, ‘Das abendländische Gespräch’, in Heidegger, Zu Hölderlin – Griechenlandreisen (GA75), ed. Curd Ochwadt (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000), 188. The phrase itself comes from one of the drafts of Friedensfeier. Cf. Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe (3 vols.), ed. Michael Knaupp (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998), vol. 1, 358. ‘Und immer größer, denn sein Feld, wie der Götter Gott / Er selbst, muß einer der anderen auch seyn’. 47 Variously, Deus deorum; θεός θεῶν; El‘elohim. 48 Psalms 49:1; 81:1; 83:7; 135:2; Deuteronomy 10:17; Daniel 11:26. 49 See Martin Heidegger, Parmenides (GA54), ed. Manfred S. Frings (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1992 [1982]), 204. ‘Ohne Descartes, d. h. ohne metaphysische Gründung der Subjektivität, ist Herder, d. h. die Gründung der Volkheit der Volker, nicht zu denken’; and Martin Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie (GA56/57), ed. Bernd Heimbüchel (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1999 [1987]), 133 ff. 50 G. W. F. Hegel, ‘Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (1821)’, in Werke in zwanzig Bänden (Bd. 7), ed. Eduard Gans (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986 [1970]), 403. ‘Der Staat ist der Geist, der in der Welt steht und sich in derselben mit Bewußtsein realisiert . . . es ist der Gang Gottes in der Welt . . . sein Grund ist die Gewalt der sich als Wille verwirklichenden Vernunft’ (Gans’s reported emphasis). 51 Martin Heidegger, ‘Abendgespräch in einem Kriegsgefangenlager’, in Heidegger, Feldweg-Gespräche (1944/45) (GA77), ed. Ingrid Schüßler (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2007 [1995]), 216. ‘Die Verwüstung auch dort und



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gerade dort herrscht, wo Land und Volk den Zerstörungen des Krieges nicht getroffen wurden’. 52 Heidegger speaks of awaiting this God, or accepting its absence, in the Spiegel interview, cf. ‘Spiegel-Gespräch mit Martin Heidegger’, 671 ff. 53 Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (GA65), 54. ‘Der Bolschewismus ist ursprünglich westlich, europäische Möglichkeit: das Heraufkommen der Massen, die Industrie, Technik, das Absterben des Christentums; sofern aber die Vernunftherrschaft als Gleichsetzung aller nur die Folge des Christentums ist und dieses im Grunde jüdischen Ursprungs (vgl. Nietzsches Gedanke vom Sklavenaufstand der Moral), ist der Bolschewismus in der Tat jüdisch; aber dann ist auch das Christentum im Grunde bolschewistisch!’ 54 Martin Heidegger, ‘Die Grundfrage der Philosophie: Sommersemester 1933’, in Heidegger, Sein und Wahrheit (GA36/37), ed. Hartmut Tietjen (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2001), 60: ‘völlig ungriechisch . . . durch die arabischjüdische und christliche Philosophie entstanden’ (Heidegger’s emphasis). 55 Martin Heidegger, ‘Zeichen’, in Heidegger, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens (GA13), ed. Hermann Heidegger (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002 [1985]), 212. ‘Die heute als die erste und letzte Wirklichkeit gilt – früher heißt sie Gott’. 56 For one example, see Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination: From the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). See also the ‘Preface’ and first chapter of David Rapport Lachterman, The Ethics of Geometry: A Genealogy of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1989), vii – 24. 57 See Hemming, Heidegger and Marx, esp. 167–83 and Heidegger, ‘Heidegger’s Claim: “Carl Schmitt Thinks as a Liberal” ’, Journal for Cultural Research 20, no. 3 (2016): 286–94. 58 Trawny, Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung, 101. ‘Von seinem Antisemitismus zu sprechen, impliziert also nicht, daß das seinsgeschichtliche Denken als solches antisemitisch ist’. 59 Ibid., 13. ‘So kann niemals ganz ausgeschlossen werden, er könnte Gewalt gegen Juden für notwendig gehalten haben’. 60 Faye later withdrew this suggestion after Robert Bernasconi and I, in separate places, challenged it. Emmanuel Faye, L’introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie: Autour des séminaires inédits de 1933–1935 (Paris: Albin Michel, 2005), 13. ‘Selon Heidegger, personne n’est mort dans les camps d’anéantissement, parce que personne de ceux qui y furent exterminés ne portait dans son essence la possibilité de la mort’ (Faye’s emphasis); Emmanuel Faye, ‘Being, History, Technology, and Extermination in the Work of Heidegger’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 50, no. 1 (2012): 111–30, esp. 125 and note 44. ‘Two Anglo-Saxon Heideggerians have taken the tack of basing their critique on a huge and surprising misinterpretation of my own interpretation, and of wrongfully attributing to me a thesis according to which Heidegger claimed there were no victims of the Nazi extermination camps!’ 61 Martin Heidegger, ‘Überlegungen IV’ (1934/35), in Heidegger, Überlegungen II-VI (GA94), ed. Peter Trawny (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2014),

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248. ‘Das Sein zum Wort bringen: Dadaismus. Wo sind wir, wenn solches möglich wird und dieser ‘Begriff’ der Philosophie den Aufbau der ‘deutschen Kultur’ leitet?’. 62 Ibid., 247. ‘Philosophie: die Wesung des Seins ins Wort setzen’. 63 This is akin to Socrates’s acidic distinction, the chasm and enmity between truth (ἀλήθεια) and true opinion (δόξα αληθές). 64 See Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (Hamburg: Meiner, 1990 [1790]), 116. 65 G.W.F. Hegel, ‘Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften’, in Werke in zwanzig Bänden (Bd. 10) (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986 [1970]), 261: ‘reproduktive Einbildungskraft’. 66 Ibid., 266. ‘Dies Gebilde ihres Selbstanschauens ist subjektiv; das Moment des Seienden fehlt noch’. 67 In his lectures of 1935, Heidegger had spoken of how Germany lay in the ‘pincers’ of Russia and America. Russian and America, he had claimed, were metaphysically the same, each characterised by the uprooted organization of the ‘average man’ (‘Der bodenlosen Organisation des Normalmenschen’). Martin Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik (GA40), ed. Petra Jaeger (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983 [1953]), 41. 68 Heidegger, ‘Die Grundfrage der Philosophie (GA36/37)’, 57. ‘Dieser Grund, darin der Bestand gegründet wird, ist das Dasein des Menschen; und zwar nicht des Menschen überhaupt, sondern des geschichtlichen Menschen in seinem sprachlich volkhaften und geistig bestimmten Miteinandersein der Zueinandergehörigen und Füreinanderverpflichteten. Die beherrschende Grundwirklichkeit dieses Miteinanderseins ist die Sprache’ (Heidegger’s emphasis). 69 Martin Heidegger, ‘Anmerkung II’ (1946), in Anmerkungen I–V (1942–1948) (GA97), ed. Peter Trawny (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2015), 202. ‘Die ‘Phänomenologie des Geistes’ ist das Ende. Die Topologie des Seyns ist der An-fang. Dabei handelt es sich nicht um Hegel, nicht um Heidegger, nicht um das Verhältnis dieser beiden. Die Ortschaft des Seyns ist der Unterschied’.

Part III

OUTSIDE THE GLOBAL: CROSSINGS

Chapter 9

Thinking the Clearing in the Age of the Earth System Heidegger and ‘Cities Like Forests’ Henry Dicks One of the fundamental concepts of Heidegger’s thought is the ‘clearing’ (die Lichtung). Seen in very broad terms, the clearing may be interpreted as some sort of ‘space’ or ‘opening’ in which things come to presence.1 But what exactly is the nature of this space or opening? Can it, for example, be assimilated to consciousness? Such an interpretation obviously links the clearing to the understanding, but at the same time it reduces the clearing to the mind or psyche of the individual subject. So could the clearing instead be thought of as the physical space around and between us, in which various different things appear? The problem here is the opposite one of severing the clearing from the understanding, thus reducing the clearing to the objective spatiality of the external world. But if the clearing is neither the consciousness of the individual subject nor the objective spatiality of the external world – two interpretations which obviously remain trapped in the Cartesian subjectobject dualism Heidegger rejects –, what is it? Moreover, why use the apparent metaphor of the clearing in the forest, developed at length in ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’?2 What does this apparent metaphor contribute that a purely conceptual description would not? A further complication arises from Heidegger’s view that the clearing is currently concealed, or, as he puts it, that ‘philosophy knows nothing of the clearing’.3 Things appear, and people relate to them in all sorts of different ways, but the fact that things appear and the nature of the ‘space’ or ‘opening’ in which they appear is not, Heidegger thinks, a question with which philosophy is currently concerned, or at least able to respond to in an adequate manner. Inattention to the clearing, Heidegger maintains, reaches its zenith in cybernetics. Indeed, he thinks that even consciousness – let alone the clearing – is regarded by cybernetics as a ‘disruptive factor’.4 The key argument of 215

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cybernetics, as initially formulated by Norbert Wiener in Cybernetics, was that both living beings and the new generation of automated machines being developed at the time are ‘self-regulating systems’.5 In The Human Use of Human Beings, Wiener then went on to apply the basic cybernetic concepts of information, feedback, regulation, and so on, to other fields, particularly the human sciences, such as linguistics, law, and social policy.6 As a result of the rapid expansion of cybernetics in the Post-War era carried out by Wiener and his colleagues, Heidegger concluded that it had become the ‘fundamental science’.7 An important example of cybernetics’ growing status as the ‘fundamental science’ is the Gaia hypothesis, put forward by James Lovelock.8 While working for NASA, Lovelock noticed that the chemical composition of the earth’s atmosphere was radically different from that of the other planets of our solar system, particularly Mars. This difference, he thought, resulted from the activities of living beings, and he further hypothesized that the combined activities of living beings regulated or – in a revised version of the hypothesis9 – participated in the regulation of the earth system, so as to make it habitable. The basic mechanism posited for this was the cybernetic one of self-regulation: if the earth has remained habitable for billions of years, Lovelock reasoned that this must be because of negative feedback mechanisms which correct any deviation from habitability. Widespread acceptance of this hypothesis by the scientific community, Lovelock thinks, has been demonstrated by a declaration, signed by 1,000 scientists at the European Geophysical Union in Amsterdam in 2001, which begins with the following affirmation: ‘The Earth System behaves as a single, self-regulating system with physical, chemical, biological, and human components’.10 Leaving aside the persistent scientific controversies regarding nature and the existence of these self-regulating mechanisms,11 what is most important here as far as we’re concerned is the idea that humans are just another component in the ‘Earth System’, which is viewed – as Lovelock himself did while working for NASA – from an extra-terrestrial perspective. So, just as an astronaut viewing the earth from a spaceship may see the earth as resembling a ‘blue marble’, so the earth system scientist may adopt a similarly extraterrestrial perspective, seeing it as a system of interacting components, some of which happen to be human. Around the time the earth came to be viewed as a system comprising various different components, it also became clear that the human components of the system were putting in danger, if not the earth system itself, then at least the existence of civilization and perhaps even homo sapiens, considered as a part of that system. Indeed, the extent of human disruption of the earth system is now so great that many geologists think we have entered a new geological era: the Anthropocene. Further, the fact that this initially geological concept



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is increasingly being appropriated by scientists and researchers in all sorts of other disciplines, particularly the humanities,12 testifies to the extent to which the world view of an earth system containing disruptive human components currently holds sway over contemporary thought. From the perspective of Heideggerian phenomenology, however, seeing humans as in the first instance disruptive components of the earth system is the culmination of ‘the age of the world picture’, for it is here that the clearing attains a state of total and absolute concealment. Further, drawing on de Beistegui, one may argue that the most appropriate translation of ‘Gestell’ – the essence of technology, according to Heidegger – is ‘system’,13 for it is precisely when the world becomes viewed above all as an earth system that the clearing or the open, and therewith also ‘poiēsis’, understood as ‘bringing into the clearing’, attains a state of total concealment.14 In light of this overall situation, the hypothesis the present paper will explore is the following: that the need to respond to the global ecological crisis provides us with the possibility not just to reconsider and reorient the behaviour of the ‘human components’ of the earth system, but also – and more profoundly – to think about the clearing in a way that is existentially relevant to this crisis. Before we can see how this might occur, however, let us first consider the emerging field of biomimicry and in particular the concept of ‘biomimetic cities’. BIOMIMETIC CITIES One response to the global ecological crisis drawing increasing attention is biomimicry. Biomimicry is associated above all with the work of Janine Benyus, who notes that non-human life forms have sustainably inhabited the planet for 3.8 billion years and then goes on to argue that if we humans are to endure we must imitate and draw inspiration from them.15 Examples of biomimicry often involve the imitation of specific functional properties of living organisms (e.g., the self-cleaning properties of the lotus flower), but Benyus’s more ecologically oriented approach emphasizes the imitation of various systemic features of life on earth. In many respects, biomimicry provides a convincing response to many of the problems of the current paradigm of globalization, in which standardized products and techniques are exported across the planet regardless of the specificities of place, as is the case in, say, industrial manufacturing and internationalist architecture. In contrast to this, biomimicry seeks to address such global problems as climate change while drawing inspiration from the specificities of local ecosystems. Ecological rules and principles apply both to the biosphere as a whole and to local ecosystems, but any given local ecosystem

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will realize them in a specific way, depending on local climate, soils, flora, fauna, and so on, hence Benyus’s observation that ‘Nature demands local expertise’.16 And, if we are to imitate or draw inspiration from Nature, we must likewise draw on this ‘local expertise’. So, while biomimicry offers the possibility of a ‘global’ response to the ecological crisis, for it constitutes a broad philosophical framework on which all of humanity could potentially draw, this response would nevertheless be differentiated according to the specificities of local ecosystems. Convinced by this broad approach, various contemporary advocates of biomimicry have proposed using nature as a model or source of inspiration for cities. As a general rule, the favoured model is the ecosystem17 and in particular the forest,18 an idea which seems to have emerged first in the work of Michael Braungart and William McDonough: ‘Imagine a building like a tree, a city like a forest’.19 What Braungart and McDonough mean by this is that buildings should follow trees in running on solar energy, providing a habitat for other species, purifying water, providing food to eat (their key example is the cherry tree), being made of fully recyclable components, and so on. At the level of the city, the principal consequence would be the circulation of both biological and technical nutrients20 in more or less closed loops, powered by solar energy. This is not to say, of course, that all cities would draw inspiration from an identical model, for the world’s forests vary greatly in their composition, organization and so on, but the forest does nevertheless stand out as the principal model currently invoked in the field of biomimetic urbanism. Even viewed as an ‘urban system’, however, the ‘biomimetic city’ would clearly not be composed solely of biological and technical components, but also of human components. This in turn raises the question of the place humans might occupy in biomimetic cities. With this question in mind, let us briefly consider the proposal of James Lovelock – developed independently of biomimicry as theorized by Benyus – that we air-condition entire cities by taking inspiration from the nests of social insects (particularly termites), thus solving the problem of how cities might adapt to climate change.21 Having proposed the nests of social insects as an appropriate model for future cities, Lovelock goes on to argue that humans should also adopt the behaviour and social organization of these insects. Indeed, at one point he even suggests that we take army ants (Eciton burchelli) as a model for human behaviour and social organization, for doing so would allow us to replace what he sees as the ‘demagogic egalitarianism’ of current societies by a hierarchical class system and a military culture more adapted to the logic of a ‘city-nest’.22 Leaving aside this highly idiosyncratic choice of model, the overall point it nevertheless suggests is that whatever natural model we might take for our cities, it will inevitably have a strong influence on how we see ourselves.23



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Returning to the more widely discussed model of the forest, this raises the following question: how might the model of the forest influence the way we see ourselves? Would it not also run the risk of reducing humanity to a kind of imitation or simulacra of one or more forest-dwelling species, thus failing to recognize and leave a place for specifically human ‘ek-stasis’? With this question in mind, it is worth noting that Vincent Callebaut, a Belgian architect and urbanist recently asked by the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, to imagine a hypothetical metamorphosis of the French capital by the year 2050, not only proposes that we should ‘transform our cities into ecosystems, our districts into forests, and our buildings into inhabited trees’,24 but also asks whether homo sapiens will become ‘homo bionicus, returned to the trees, in the manner of our distant ancestors’ or perhaps rather ‘homo digitalis – always connected, with a smartphone glued to our fingers, fusing our intelligence with that of machines’.25 Callebaut concludes that we do not need to choose, that we can combine the ecological embeddedness of our primate ancestors with the advanced digital technologies of the future. There is, however, an alternative possibility for human self-understanding raised by the model of the forest. The forest does not necessarily have to exclude human ‘ek-stasis’, as is clearly the case in Callebaut’s anthropology, which amounts to little more than a synthesis of ecological and technological intelligence, for it is possible to see the forest as containing ‘clearings’, or rather, if we are to think phenomenologically, to see the forest from out of the clearing. In order, however, to make sense of this idea, let us first take a detour via Peter Sloterdijk’s recent and unorthodox attempt to put forward a ‘fantastic reconstruction’ of the genesis of the clearing. THINKING THE CLEARING In Die Domestikation des Seins: Für eine Verdeutlichung der Lichtung,26 Sloterdijk takes up Heidegger’s view that human existence is in some sense a ‘clearing’. Where he differs from Heidegger, however, is in his attempt to put forward what he calls a ‘fantastical reconstruction’ of the genesis of the clearing. More specifically, he aims to articulate palaeo-anthropological research into human evolution with what he playfully calls ‘palaeo-ontological’ thinking about the emergence of the clearing, his overall aim being to put forward a necessarily speculative account of how the clearing came to be. This project is of course liable to elicit the objection that it is contradictory to say that the clearing ‘emerged’ or ‘came to be’, for the clearing is itself presupposed in all talk of emerging or coming to be; the clearing would have had already to exist prior to its emergence in order for its emergence to ‘take place’, but that is obviously contradictory. Sloterdijk is, however, well aware of this objection,

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hence his remark that the methodology he proposes itself takes place within the clearing, and thus also at the present juncture in history.27 In short, Sloterdijk thinks that the above objection does not hold once one recognizes that it is from within the clearing that the investigation into the genesis of the clearing is carried out. Having established his method, Sloterdijk’s fantastical reconstruction begins with an analysis of Heidegger’s famous claim that ‘language is the house of being’.28 Agreeing with this claim, Sloterdijk further adds that it is not only in language that Being is housed. For Sloterdijk, the construction of houses – understood in a broad metaphorical sense of creating a protective frontier between an inside and an outside – is the key process that allows the clearing to emerge, hence his overall proposal to ‘imagine becoming-human itself as a truly domestic affair, a drama of domestication, in the radical sense of the term’.29 Domestication, in this ‘radical sense’, consists of four key processes: (1) insulation from the pressures of natural selection, notably via the protection afforded by living in large groups; (2) the ‘deactivation of the body’ (Körperausschaltung), by which he means the interposition of tools between humans and their natural environment, such that direct contact with the latter is reduced; (3) neoteny, or the preservation of juvenile characteristics in adult life; and (4) transference (Übertragung), understood as the ability to recreate former states of domestication following periods of crisis. In line with his claim that fantastical reconstruction occurs in relation to the current state of civilization, Sloterdijk then controversially goes on to argue that the manipulation of the human genome could constitute the next phase in his grand narrative of the ‘domestication of Being’.30 One thing that is particularly striking about Sloterdijk’s fantastical reconstruction is the way the initial objective of elucidating the clearing immediately gives way to that of elucidating the house. Concomitantly, the initial objective of elucidating hominization immediately gives way to that of elucidating domestication. So, whereas the metaphor of the house is the subject of a lengthy analysis and indeed provides Sloterdijk’s grand narrative with its guiding thread, the clearing takes on the role of what Ricœur calls a ‘dead metaphor’,31 that is to say, a metaphor that is no longer recognized as such and which instead functions as an abstract philosophical concept, in this instance one which designates ‘ek-stasis’. We shall presently see, however, that rather than forgetting or overlooking the clearing, and instead concentrating on the house (and by extension domestication), it is possible to accord to the clearing a comparable role to the one played by the house in Sloterdijk’s grand narrative: the clearing in the forest – which would likewise have to be understood in a ‘radical sense’ – may be read as



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the guiding thread allowing us to understand both anthropogenesis and the emergence of ‘ek-stasis’. *** According to the calculations of paleoanthropologists, approximately 6 or 7 million years have elapsed since humans and their closest living relatives, chimpanzees, diverged from their most recent common ancestor. Within these 6 or 7 million years, three periods are particularly important. The first, which spanned the first 4 to 5 million years, was characterized above all by the transition from a heavily forested environment to a more open one, almost certainly as a result of climate change.32 Thus it was that over a period of 4 to 5 million years, various important candidates for human ancestry – Orrorin tugenensis, Ardipithecus ramidus, the australopithecines, etc. – adapted to life in what may broadly be described as forest clearings, evolving many of the physiological traits that would later on come to define the human, particularly bipedalism, an adaptation that Jean-Jacques Hublin explains as follows: ‘Initially, bipedalism was doubtless practised simply to go from one tree to another or from one group of trees to another. When the forest receded, it facilitated adaptation to a mixed environment, combining trees and open spaces’.33 The second key period, which coincided with a further regression of the great African forests caused by climate change,34 began around 2 million years ago with the emergence of the genus Homo, and in particular homo erectus. Unlike the various species comprising the genus Australopithecus, but also homo habilis and homo rudolfensis, all of which would appear to have retained some capacity for ­arboreal locomotion, this new genus was characterized by exclusively bipedal locomotion – including running – adapted to an almost entirely open environment.35 The third period is that of the emergence of homo sapiens, thought to be between 200,000 and 50,000 years ago, and whose flourishing since the last ice age ended approximately 12,000 years ago has depended on the ability to maintain and enlarge open habitat by various techniques of deforestation (fire, axes, saws, etc.), and therewith also the possibility of wide-scale agriculture, sedentary lifestyles and the rise of civilizations. So, just as Sloterdijk argues that the story of mankind’s emergence and ascent is in the first instance a story of domestication, I would argue that it is in the first instance a story of ‘inventing clearings’, where ‘invention’ is to be understood first as ‘coming into’ (coming to dwell in) and then as ‘dis-covering’ (opening, clearing). From this perspective, all the processes of domestication Sloterdijk describes ultimately take place in clearings or open environments, and yet Sloterdijk at no point sees any connection between these open environments and Heidegger’s notion of the ‘clearing’. The clearing, as noted above, is for Sloterdijk but a ‘dead metaphor’.

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We have just seen that, from an anthropological perspective, the guiding thread of the emergence and ascent of humans can be described as the ‘invention of the clearing’. However, while this anthropological understanding of the clearing is far more complex than the idea that the clearing is simply the objective spatiality of the external world, it nevertheless needs to be articulated with an ontological understanding of the genesis of the clearing, and thus also with the question of the openness of Being. With this in mind, let us briefly consider the work of the cultural psychologist, Michael Tomasello. According to Tomasello, what distinguishes humans from our primate ancestors is what he and other psychologists call ‘joint attention’.36 Unlike chimpanzees, Tomasello argues, humans can ‘show something to others’, for example by presenting it before them or by pointing at it, such that the attention of all parties concerned is drawn towards the entity, albeit from different perspectives. Tomasello then draws on this basic concept to explain various other specificities of human behaviour. Language, to take a key example, is interpreted as in the first instance a way of attracting the attention of others towards a given phenomenon, and thus also of showing something to someone. The proximity of Tomasello’s notion of ‘joint attention’ to Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology may become apparent through a brief consideration of the latter’s analysis of ‘production’. Heidegger interprets the word ‘production’ in the etymological sense of ‘bringing before’ (hervorbringen), and thus also as ‘poiēsis’, that is to say, ‘bringing into the open’.37 If an entity is ‘there’, Heidegger thinks, this is because it has been ‘pro-duced’ or ‘presented’, that is to say, placed before someone and thereby brought to their attention. Moreover, just as Tomasello thinks that joint attention implies the possibility of divergent yet simultaneous perspectives on an entity, Heidegger thinks that the ‘presence’ of things – their appearing in the open or clearing – likewise goes hand in hand with their openness to interpretation and thus to being understood in a variety of different ways (‘as’ X, Y or Z). Similarly, it is also important in this context to note that, like Tomasello, Heidegger interprets language above all as a way of ‘showing’ things, and not as a way of designating or representing them.38 In view of all this, it is clear that the pre-ontological understanding and interpretation of Being that takes place in the clearing cannot be reduced to mental operations carried out by an individual subject. Indeed, in opposition to the dominant school of individualist psychology, Tomasello’s cultural psychology is clearly unthinkable without a shared space of appearance, for without a shared space of appearance it would not be possible for people jointly to attend to things from a multiplicity of different perspectives (and thus interpret them ‘as’ X, Y or Z). So, whereas animal cognition works with



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a variety of ‘categories’ (food, enemy, etc.), animals cannot jointly attend to entities, such that what they are – their ‘as’ – becomes an open question to be decided upon by more than one individual.39 If one accepts the above analyses, this still leaves open the question of the relation between the anthropological and the ontological interpretations of the clearing: the clearing as the open environment where human evolution took place and the clearing as the ‘space’ wherein the Being of entities becomes open. In The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, Tomasello states with respect to joint attention that ‘we know nothing of the ecological pressures that may have favored this adaptation, and we can hypothesize any number of adaptive advantages it might have conferred’.40 There are, however, various ways in which the transition to open environments would have provided a particularly favourable context for the evolution of joint attention. For example as tool-making became much more complex and central to survival, the accurate transmission of manufacturing techniques would have become increasingly important, and this could only have been accomplished by ‘showing’ others how to do so, a process which of course requires joint attention. Likewise, in an open environment, the ability to point, and thus to draw someone else’s attention to something distant (prey, predators, water, trees, other early humans, etc.), could likewise make the difference between life and death, for it could enable joint decisions to be made with respect to such things as the extraction of raw materials for tool-making (wood from forests, stone from river banks, etc.), scavenging or hunting for food, moving to a new home base, or interacting with other groups. In short, the ability both to ‘show’ and to ‘point’ would have come under selective pressure in bipedal tool-makers dwelling in open environments in a way that it would not have done in primate species inhabiting forested environments. Ultimately, however, what is perhaps most important here is not so much the necessarily speculative details of the fantastical reconstruction, but rather the insight that coming to dwell in clearings may plausibly be seen as concomitant with the emergence of the openness of Being, and thus also with the clearing in Heidegger’s ontological sense of the word.

IMAGINE A CITY LIKE A FOREST, AN AGORA LIKE A CLEARING Returning to the issue of biomimetic cities, it is clear that modelling cities on forests – where the latter are conceived as ecosystems without any human components – participates in what Heidegger sees as the complete concealment of the clearing characteristic of the ‘Age of the Earth System’.

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In keeping with this conclusion, biomimicry has typically been applied to the city by saying that urban systems should imitate or draw inspiration from natural ecosystems. It is, however, also possible to view the forest not as in the first instance an ecosystem (from which human components are absent), but rather as the milieu – the lived environment – of humankind’s primate ancestors.41 Likewise, it is also possible to view the emergence of humanity as involving not only the transition from a densely forested ecosystem to a more or less open one (wooded savannah, steppe. . .), but as coming to dwell in the ‘clearing’, where the clearing is understood as the ‘world’ (Welt) of human beings, that is to say, a clear and open milieu in which the Being of beings for the first time becomes open. Cities, on this view, could still be imagined as forests, but these forests would have to contain a ‘clearing’, understood as a space where the Being of beings becomes open to interpretation from multiple divergent perspectives. This possibility in turn raises the following question: if trees are to be seen as the model or source of inspiration for buildings, and forests as the model or source of inspiration for cities, for what might forest clearings be the model or source of inspiration? The answer, I will now suggest, is the urban agora.42 In order to explore this idea in more detail, let us first undertake a brief analysis of the agora. Viewed from an anthropological perspective, the agora is an open public space generally situated near the centre of the polis where a variety of different activities take place.43 In particular, the agora is the site of the market, the parliament, and the law courts, but also of philosophy (e.g., Socrates) and poetry (e.g., Homer). In different historical and cultural contexts, these various activities may well have been relocated elsewhere, fragmented, or radically disconnected from one other, while also assuming greater importance and power with respect to one another,44 but they are still present in the Western cities (and states45) of today. From an ontological perspective, what is distinctive about the agora is the fact that the being of any ‘thing’46 that appears in it becomes open in at least one of its aspects. When brought to market, a product becomes open to purchase and thus possession by others. When discussed in parliaments, a bill or policy proposal becomes open to debate and eventually also to ratification. And when brought to trial, the guilt or innocence of a person becomes open to the judgment and decision of a jury or magistrate. This ‘openness’ cannot, however, last indefinitely. After a certain length of time, a product will be purchased or withdrawn from sale, a bill ratified or rejected, a suspect condemned or acquitted. This passage from the ‘openness’ of the thing to its ‘closure’ may be described as a process of ‘categorization’, understood etymologically (‘kata’, meaning ‘against’ + ‘agora’), but also in the sense of the attribution of a predicate to the thing – ‘S is P’ – whose validity is recognized by the community as a whole: this product is X’s; this bill is passed; this person is innocent.



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It is not, however, only ‘things’ which appear in the agora. Indeed, with the advent of philosophy, ‘Being’ – and in particular the verb ‘to be’ in propositions of the form ‘S is P’ – also comes to appear in the agora, thus opening itself to debate and interpretation, but also to categorization as this or that – as the ideal in idealism, as the real in realism, etc. – depending on the philosophical ‘school’ in question. Likewise, it is also within the sphere of philosophy that the great regional ontologies – What is life? What is man? What is the good? – become open to interpretation, debate, and eventually also to categorization. Lastly, in poetry it is neither beings nor Being that appear in the agora, but rather the world, such that each great poem or work of art may be seen as a response to the same fundamental question: what is the world? In view of all this, it is clear that the agora shares a number of profound similarities with the clearing. Indeed, not only are the clearing and the agora both open spaces where various modalities of human gathering or assembly take place, but in both cases the key phenomenon is the presentation or production of something before a plurality of others, such that at least one aspect of that thing’s being becomes open (to appropriation, to interpretation, to debate, and so on). Nevertheless, it is also clear that the clearing and the agora present various differences, of which three are particularly important. The first is the fact that with the emergence of the polis and the agora our ways of asking and answering the fundamental questions previously asked in the clearing – What is X? What shall we do about Y? How shall we share out Z? – become ‘institutionalized’ in the form of markets, parliaments, tribunals, schools, and so on. The second is that the questions posed within the agora concern the polis: its agricultural and industrial production, the state of its finances, its relation to other poleis, its knowledge about the world, and so on. As such, they clearly differ in their specificities from many of the questions posed in the clearing, which instead concern such things as what to hunt or gather, whether to move to a new home base or how to deal with neighbouring tribes. The third is the fact that, if Heidegger is correct, the question of ‘Being itself’ (the nature of the ‘as’) only emerged with Greek thinking and philosophy, and thus also – I would add – with the agora. If this is the case, then the question of Being is not a question necessarily posed in the clearing, since it first emerged only with the birth of Greek philosophy in the agora.47 Given these similarities and differences, what could it mean to ‘imagine an agora like a clearing’? The first important point to note here is that, just as it is not a question here of replacing buildings with trees or replacing cities with forests, it is also not a question of replacing agorae with forest clearings. Just as a house modelled on a tree would retain places to sleep, eat, wash, relax, and so on, the agora would remain an agora, and, as such, would retain its basic institutions, its concern with the affairs of the polis, and its openness to

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the question of Being. Nevertheless, if the agora is at the same time to draw inspiration from the clearing, its basic institutions and the things present in them would nevertheless have to be modified or at least seen in a different light. For a start, the transformation of the city in line with the model of the forest would imply a variety of obvious modifications of the agora: markets would offer more biomimetic or bio-inspired products; governments would show much greater awareness and determination to implement or foster biomimetic ‘laws, strategies, and principles’;48 and the judiciary would in turn enforce the relevant laws ratified by parliament. This is not to say, however, that the specific concerns of humans would be ignored, as if we would from this point on strive only to implement the basic laws, principles, and strategies characteristic of Nature (viewed eco-systemically); with the advent of the clearing, there also emerge a number of questions and activities that are specific to humans. To give a key example, the question of how to ‘share food’, which Corine Pelluchon has recently argued is fundamental to a viable theory of justice,49 is a question that first emerges with the clearing (i.e., with joint attention), and which would, as such, require sustained attention in the agora. It is not, however, only economic and political questions that would be concerned by this transformation of the agora, but philosophy qua fundamental ontology as well. Indeed, not only does joint attention remind us that the fundamental human situation is one of potentially different perspectives on things, such that anything that enters the agora is thereby open to multiple divergent perspectives and attempts at categorization, but, as Tomasello’s analyses show quite clearly, the openness of the Being of beings (i.e., of their ‘as’) that occurs in joint attention implies the possibility of understanding ‘something as something else’,50 hence also the possibility of understanding a city ‘as’ or ‘like’ a forest. The openness of Being, it follows, is precisely what makes it possible to imagine buildings like trees, cities like forests, and the agora like a clearing. CONCLUSION Many contemporary discourses about the ‘clearing’ in Heidegger’s thought analyse this concept almost uniquely in terms of other concepts more or less specific to Heidegger (Dasein, aletheia, the ready-to-hand, etc.) or at most in reference to other philosophical concepts, such as meaning, transcendence, or spatiality.51 The present chapter, by contrast, has sought to articulate the purely ‘ontological’ methodology practised by Heidegger and his followers with the ‘ontical’ methodologies practised in various other disciplines.



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The first major interdisciplinary field opened up by this approach is the relation between ontology and anthropology. Drawing on a similarly interdisciplinary methodology put forward by Sloterdijk, while advancing radically different conclusions, I have argued that the clearing should not be seen as a ‘metaphor’ for the space where Being discloses itself, for not only did the evolution of modern humans depend in the first instance on the ‘thinning out’ or ‘clearing’ of the tropical forests of Africa inhabited by our primate ancestors, but it was in the open spaces or clearings thereby disclosed that there evolved the specific physiological and psychological capacities characteristic of Dasein. Of particular importance here is Michael Tomasello’s analysis of the uniquely human capacity of ‘joint attention’, for it is via joint attention that things enter a shared space of appearance wherein they become open to a diverse range of simultaneous yet divergent interpretations, including being interpreted as something that, on the face of it, they are not. The clearing, on this interpretation, is both the foundational and principal ecological niche of humans and the space wherein Being discloses itself. The second major interdisciplinary field this chapter opens up is the relation between phenomenological ontology on the one hand, and biomimetic urbanism and political philosophy on the other. According to biomimetic urbanism, to make cities sustainable we need to ‘imagine buildings like trees, cities like forests’. As it stands, the principal problem with this proposal is that it typically involves the reduction of the forest to a ‘mature ecosystem’ and a city to an ‘urban system’, in such a way that a biomimetic city is seen simply as a technological system modelled on or inspired by a natural ecosystem. From a Heideggerian perspective, this way of thinking remains trapped within a metaphysical interpretation of the world as a ‘picture’, and, more specifically, as an interlocking set of systems that together make up an earth system and which are all amenable to objective representation and manipulation. In view of this, the key argument of the present chapter is that it is possible to retain the proposal of ‘imagining a city like a forest’, while overcoming the forgetting of the clearing that currently characterizes contemporary thinking – biomimetic urbanism included – through imagining ‘the agora like a clearing’. This would have three major implications. First, it would allow biomimetic products to enter the market and biomimetic principles and strategies to influence politics, thus also underlining the fact that if the city is indeed to be modelled on the forest it is through the complex and unpredictable workings of the agora – markets, politics, philosophy, poetry, etc. – that this new way of thinking must emerge.52 Second, it would avoid the danger that in striving to implement the ecological laws, principles and strategies advanced by Benyus we would necessarily end up ignoring or sacrificing specifically human concerns, for, in contrast to the forest, the clearing is a site where all sorts of ‘things’ become open, such as the question of how we share

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‘food’ (les nourritures), which Corine Pelluchon argues is the fundamental issue for a viable theory of justice. Third, it allows us to see that anything that appears in the agora – even the call to ‘imagine a city like a forest’ – is, by the very nature of the clearing of Being, open to simultaneous and divergent interpretations, thus underlining the inevitability and the importance of disagreement and the need to see biomimicry not in terms of a straightforward and unproblematic transfer of function from the life sciences to technology, but hermeneutically, as always involving interpretation. Globalization – and therewith also the theme of the ‘global age’ – is the third major topic of investigation the present chapter opens up. For a start, the phenomenological analyses of the clearing and the agora call into question the very concept of the ‘globe’, understood not just cartographically as a three-dimensional plane for travel, exploration, and conquest, but in keeping with the emergence of cybernetics and systems theory as an ‘Earth System’ featuring human components. Indeed, in keeping with phenomenology in general, the extra-terrestrial world view implied in the very notion of the ‘globe’ ignores the clearing and the agora qua inter-personal spaces where the being of things – and, in the case of the agora, the being of Being – becomes open to discussion, reflexion, and eventual categorization. Moreover, taking the forest and the clearing as source of inspiration for the city and the agora likewise calls into question the phenomenon of globalization, understood as the planetary circulation of goods, people and ideas. In forest ecosystems, not only is the circulation of nutrients or goods largely internal, but the way any particular forest works will depend on local specificities (climate, soils, seasonality, historical contingencies, etc.). And yet, this is not to say that it would be possible for every city to re-invent itself along biomimetic lines in complete interdependence from other cities. Common techniques, strategies, and principles, such as photosynthesis, symbioses between plants and fungi, and the recycling of nutrients, are shared by all forest ecosystems and in order for biomimicry to take hold not just in local pockets but globally, the circulation and sharing of these techniques, strategies, and principles would be essential. In this respect, then, biomimicry – and in particular the concept of biomimetic cities – could play an important role in the as yet unattainable objective of ‘decoupling’ flows of knowledge from flows of goods, such that while the former would remain global (transfers of technology, best practices, international conferences, etc.), the latter would be increasingly local. NOTES 1 Martin Heidegger, ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’, in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993), 441.



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2 Ibid., 442. 3 Ibid., 443. 4 Martin Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars: Protocols – Conversations – Letters, trans. Franz Mayr and Richard Askay (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 21. 5 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1948). 6 Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1954). 7 Heidegger, ‘End of Philosophy’, 434. 8 James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 9 James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 10 ‘Gaia: From Hypothesis to Theory – Scientific Study to Prove Earth is Alive’, Humans are free, accessed 29 September 2016, http://humansarefree.com/2011/11/ gaia-from-hypothesis-to-theory.html. 11 Timothy M. Lenton, ‘Gaia and Natural Selection’, Nature 394 (30 July 1998): 439–47. 12 Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, L’événement Anthropocène: La Terre, l’histoire, et nous (Paris: Seuil, 2013); and Bruno Latour, ‘Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene’, New Literary History 45 (2014): 1–18. 13 Miguel de Beistegui, The New Heidegger (London: Continuum Press, 2005), 111. 14 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in Basic Writings, 332. 15 Janine M. Benyus, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2002). 16 Ibid., 7. 17 Dickson Despommier, The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century (New York: Picador, 2001). 18 Jed Cynan Davies, ‘Biomimicry – An Ecological Revolution. Using Biomimicry as a Tool, Could It Be Possible for Our Modern Day Cities to Perform Like Forests?’ (PhD diss., University of West England); and Vincent Callebaut, Paris 2050: Les cités fertiles faces aux enjeux du XXIe siècle (Paris: Michel Lafon, 2015). 19 Michael Braungart and William McDonough, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (London: Vintage Books, 2008), 139. 20 Biological nutrients differ from technical nutrients in that they are biodegradable. Technical nutrients (glass, plastic, metals, etc.), by contrast, must be broken down using technology if they are once again to become usable. 21 James Lovelock, A Rough Ride to the Future (London: Allen Lane, 2014), 113. 22 Ibid., 144. 23 Conversely, it is no doubt also true that how we see ourselves will strongly influence what sort of cities we might build. 24 Callebaut, Paris 2050: Les cités fertiles, back cover, my translation.

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25 Ibid., 114. 26 Cf. Peter Sloterdijk, Nicht gerettet: Versuche nach Heidegger (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 142–234. At the time of writing, this text has not yet been published in an English translation. All quotations from this text have thus been translated by the author. 27 Ibid., 154. 28 Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, 218. 29 Sloterdijk, Nicht gerettet, 171. 30 Ibid., 212–34. 31 Paul Ricœur, La métaphore vive (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975), 107. 32 Jean-Jacques Hublin, Quand d’autres hommes peuplaient la Terre: Nouveaux regards sur nos origines (Paris: Flammarion, 2008), 29–34, my translation. 33 Ibid., 34. 34 Ibid., 58. 35 Pascal Picq, Au commencement était l’homme: De Toumaï à Cro-Magnon (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2009), 100. 36 Michael Tomasello, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). Tomasello’s recent thinking about joint attention has received a significant reworking, expressed most fully in A Natural History of Human Thinking (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). It would, however, be beyond the scope of this chapter fully to integrate the various key theoretical innovations this more recent work introduces, in particular the distinction between joint intentionality and collective intentionality. Articulating this later work with Heideggerian thinking about the clearing does, however, constitute an important path for future research. 37 Martin Heidegger, Four Seminars, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell and François Raffoul (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003), 76. 38 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Way to Language’, in Basic Writings, 401–2. Tomasello’s principal philosophical point of reference is not Heidegger or phenomenological ontology, but Wittgenstein. This is not to say, however, that the link between joint attention and phenomenological ontology has gone completely unnoticed. Drawing primarily on Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Étienne Bimbenet argues in L’animal que je ne suis plus (Paris: Gallimard, 2011) that the emergence of multiple perspectives in a scene of joint attention explains what Husserl calls the ‘natural attitude’ (i.e., our spontaneous and naïve assumption of the truth of realism), for, if beings are to afford multiple perspectives, they must first exist as real entities. While other philosophical interpretations of joint attention are no doubt possible, Bimbenet’s analysis has the significant merit of drawing our attention to the potential for articulating psychological analysis of joint attention with phenomenological ontology. 39 One may perhaps be tempted to object here that certain social animals also engage in joint attention. Bees, for example, sometimes gather together to decide a new nesting site, based on the recommendations of various scouts. See Peter Miller, Smart Swarm: Using Animal Behaviour to Organise Our World (London: Penguin, 2010), 33–103. There are, however, two fundamental differences between this process and joint attention in humans. First, whereas humans can bring an almost



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unlimited number and range of things into the open (stones, shells, techniques, deities, concepts, quarks, Being itself, etc.), the gathering of bees is concerned with only one thing (a nesting site). Second, unlike humans, bees are not capable of asking the ontological question of what an entity – in this instance a nesting site – ‘is’: the category of nesting site is simply given, the result being that the decision concerns only the appropriateness of various candidate nesting sites. 40 Tomasello, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, 204–5. 41 On the notion of milieu, see Augustin Berque, Ecoumène. Introduction à l’étude des milieux humains (Paris: Bélin, 2000). 42 Sloterdijk at one point contrasts the forest clearing with the urban agora, arguing that Heidegger was a thinker only of the former, not the latter. This may well be the case, but the current proposal of ‘imagining an agora like a clearing’ clearly goes beyond this traditional dichotomy. See Sloterdijk, Nicht gerettet, 50. 43 Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York: Harcourt, 1961), 134–57. 44 In communist societies, for example, the domain of the market shrinks and is overpowered by that of government. In certain liberal capitalist societies, by contrast, it is rather the market that holds sway over the other activities of the agora. 45 The transition from the city-states of antiquity to the nation states of modernity has of course played a major role in the historical transformation of the agora and no doubt merits further analysis in this context. 46 On the subject of ‘things’, understood as matters of concern for the agora, see Bruno Latour, ‘From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik: or How to Make Things Public’, in Making Things Public – Atmospheres of Democracy Catalogue of the Show at ZKM, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 4–31. 47 This comparison between the agora and the clearing, and more generally the idea that the clearing may constitute the model for the agora, of course raises the question of the extent to which the agora is an ethnocentric concept. Perhaps nonWestern cultures could see the clearing as a model for other central places of assembly. Similarly, it also raises the question of the extent to which local agorae or public spaces may differ in their institutional framework, depending on local specificities. In view of this, it would seem that while the common model must be the forest and the clearing, quite how this model would translate into specific cities and publics spaces is very much open to question. 48 Benyus, Biomimicry, 7. 49 Corine Pelluchon, Les nourritures. Philosophie du corps politique (Paris: Seuil, 2015). 50 Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Thinking, 101–2. 51 See, for example, Richard Capobianco, Engaging Heidegger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010); and Thomas Sheehan, Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift (London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015). 52 The ‘transition towns’ movement arguably comes close to realizing the radical change advocated here, for it not only advocates much more ecological and sustainable urban technologies and practices, but it has also led to political experimentation at the level of the urban agora.

Chapter 10

Dwelling Politically Reading Heidegger in the Anthropocene* Sophia Hatzisavvidou

If there is a distinct trait that characterizes the Global Age, this is an evergrowing realization of interconnectedness of people, ideas, landscapes. The intensification of this complexity has deleterious effects on the natural environment, leading some experts to even argue that humanity has entered a new geological era, the Anthropocene: the epoch in which human activities have transformed the conditions and functions of the earth systems in unprecedented ways and the impact of these changes is noticeable in various domains of the biosphere; humans are now a geological force in themselves.1 It seems that humans are not in an ecological crisis, but rather are the ecological crisis. That said, our responses to the profound ecological changes that the biosphere undergoes are predicated on the assumption that humans must adjust their activities to the actual physical realities of the biosphere. Here is the paradox then: on the one hand, it is acknowledged that anthropos is the main source and cause of a series of pervasive environmental problems; on the other, it is proposed that the solution must begin by measuring and thus further objectifying the natural environment. In this chapter I propose that we can attend to the anthropos in the Anthropocene in a way that produces the possibility of addressing the ecological problem while resisting both the objectification of the world and anthropocentrism. I argue that Heidegger and his understanding of the concept of ēthos can help us to affirm an image of anthropos as part of the scheme of things with which she forms meaningful relations, not in order to manage them but in order to foster more equitable arrangements. Following a brief clarification of the concept of ēthos, I develop my argument in three stages. First, I return to the archaic concept of ēthos and thinking with Heidegger, but also the early philosopher Heraclitus, I elaborate a notion of ēthos as dwelling in the world, as a dynamic process of engaging the world’s exigencies. Second, 233

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I demonstrate how the element of care is folded in this worldly notion of ēthos. Finally, I propose that although Heidegger urges us to think beyond the idea of human exceptionality, at the same time his ideas on dwelling need to be infused with an element of justice, if dwelling is to have a democratic quality and appeal. The overarching argument of the chapter, then, is that Heidegger points to the importance that ēthos plays in the way we engage with others, both human and non-human, but also in the way we respond to worldly problems. If ēthos is the quality one brings to the world as she engages with it, then ēthos plays a defining role in the formation of our responses to the challenges of the Global Age. WHAT IS E¯    THOS? In its very early appearances in archaic poetry the concept of ēthos was synonymous with the habitat or dwelling place of both human and non-human beings, whereas progressively the term was also used to designate one’s character. For example when Homer2 writes about ēthea (ἤθεα) he refers to appropriate and customary places of animals, such as stables and pastures (nomes), while Hesiod3 uses the term ēthos (ἤθος) to denote one’s character and manners, one’s ‘ways’. Originally, then, the concept of ēthos referred to both the place of life – where one dwells – and the way of life – how one dwells. This ‘how’, the quality of dwelling, related both to traits such as intuitions and dispositions and to demonstrable patterns of behaviour and action, particularly given the fact that the Greek world view was one that imposed a rigid conception of privileges and duties and that dictated how these should determine people’s actions.4 In a sense, ēthos was the topos where one dwells physically, but also mentally and spiritually. With Aristotle the aspect of ēthos as habitat is lost and emphasis is given on character, an omission inherited also to contemporary political thought. There are good reasons for this omission, though. As Rancière observes, the use of the concept of ēthos as abode results to the establishment of an identity between a circumscribed environment and a principle of action, that is between a community and its laws. The problem with this identification, as Rancière explains, is that it conceals the rupture that inaugurates politics, reducing thus democracy to a certain, specified way of life.5 Eventually, the idea that ēthos is a topos gives rise to at least two problems. First, it assumes that the members of any given political society share a prescribed set of norms, codes of behaviour, and ethical principles and that, therefore, political judgment is always based on an already established consensus. Second, it assumes that political judgment is prefixed and predictable, since any future demands or challenges can be resolved by pertaining to the already



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established bond or code of conduct that is accepted by the political community. Such a circumscribed perception of political action is in contrast with the conditions of plurality and fragmentation that mark a contemporary demotic life. The idea that a political ēthos can be identified with topos is paradoxical. My purpose is to expand the original meaning of ēthos as dwelling and, working with Heidegger, to arrive to an understanding of ēthos as a process of dwelling. Thus affirmed, dwelling is a mode of associating oneself with the world; it is a way of responding to the world’s exigencies and more specifically to our environmental predicament. Overall, I suggest that ēthos is essential for the formation of collective, political responses to the problems of ‘the common world’, particularly considering the flux of political experience and the diverse possibilities of its manifestation in late modernity.6 More specifically, I argue that a democratic ēthos is one that invokes care for the world and the endorsement of one’s place in it as one of its components. Before furthering this discussion, we need to clearly set out that any attempt to draw a democratic sense of ēthos from Heidegger is paradoxical, not least because of the undeniable political undersides of his writings.7 Even though it is not my intent to twist Heidegger in order to make him appear as if he embraced political ideas that he evidently did not, we must read him, not because we should directly apply his ideas to politics but rather because they are meaningful for our understanding of certain aspects of political life. Although I turn to Heidegger particularly because he excavates the archaic concept of ēthos that I also seek to revive, there are more reasons to read Heidegger today. More specifically Heidegger, with his work on the most defining phenomena of the new age, urges us to think on the condition in which we find ourselves, to think on the Global Age as the existential canvas of our very being. Therefore, although it would be inconsistent, even hubristic, to imply that Heidegger was interested in sketching any sort of democratic ethic, still it would be equally improvident to overlook the fact that his ethical elaborations echo a concern with the possibility to forge meaningful forms of co-existence in ‘destitute times’.8 If Heidegger with his ‘Letter on Humanism’ (1946) intended to discuss not merely the meaning of being human, but particularly the meaningfulness of even talking about humanism in such times without abandoning the task to think hard on human affairs, then today his inquiries prove equally relevant as in the era of the Nuremberg Trials. HEIDEGGER’S DEMONS Heidegger discusses the notion of ēthos as early as in 1924, in his phenomenological interpretation of Aristotle’s philosophy. In these lectures Heidegger attends, among other things, to Aristotle’s fundamental idea that the art most

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pertinent to the study of ‘the good’ is politics, emphasizing particularly the fact that man is zoon politikón and as such lives miteinander; man’s essence is determined by the fact of being-with-one-another. As Heidegger explains, the very study of politics is the study of how human beings stand out in their beingwith-one-another. And he continues, ‘This standing-out [in being-with-oneanother] of the human being, this ‘comporting-oneself’ in the world, this ‘comportment’, is το ήθος’.9 One’s ēthos, Heidegger suggests, is the way one ek-sists, conducts oneself as part of his or her polis. The study of ethics is not part of the study of politics; rather the latter is ethics, because it already concerns the way one comports herself towards the world. There is a certain degree of continuity between these early ethical elaborations and the approach to ethics that Heidegger follows in his later writings. Yet, in the latter he explicitly departs from the Aristotelian conception of ēthos as one’s character and he seeks to advance a broader, original interpretation of the archaic meaning of ēthos-as-topos. This is the focus of my discussion in this chapter. The question of ‘the truth of Being’, of whether we actually know and can know the essence of being human, haunted Heidegger.10 Therefore, when in his ‘Letter on Humanism’ he defies Sartre’s claim that human nature cannot be defined in any objective way and he inquires into man’s essence, Heidegger does so not in order to restore meaning to the word ‘humanism’, but rather in order to determine humanitas, what it is to be human rather than inhuman, outside one’s essence.11 At the same time, he also seeks to outline the place of ethics in his work, a task that to Heidegger entails avoiding to elevate man to the centre of beings, as well as avoiding to ground judgments over the nature of good and evil on a metaphysical understanding of the world and its functions. The problem with this specific understanding, Heidegger explains, is that it confines thinking to its technical or instrumental aspect, by reducing thought only to its object, to what is to be thought. Consequently, he explains, metaphysical thought obscures the question of ‘the truth of Being’, by grounding it to a predetermined quality or interpretation. It is in addressing these interrelated issues – how to think properly on the essence of being human and on ethics – that Heidegger finds recourse to what in his ‘Letter on Humanism’ he calls ‘original ethics’, which he associates with the archaic concept of ēthos. Heidegger turns to ēthos in his attempt to define ethics, whereas avoiding peremptory directives and rules on how one ought to live in a fitting manner. No wonder, then, that Heidegger turns to the thought of pre-Socratic philosophers. As he observes, these early thinkers were concerned with physis in a depth and breadth that did not collapse the study of physis into physics and therefore their ethical concerns were not reduced to an ethics.12 This is because their thought had not been yet systematized into a science and



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therefore they could experience the essence of thinking. It is the search for a non-metaphysical, ‘original ethics’ that guides Heidegger to the early philosopher Heraclitus and one of his most famous yet ambiguous sayings: ēthos anthrōpoi daimōn.13 Heidegger endeavours to interpret the ambiguous fragment by breaking it into its components. He starts by defining ēthos as ‘man’s abode, dwelling place’, the terrain ‘that contains and preserves the advent of what belongs to man in his essence’.14 Man’s ēthos is inextricably linked to his quality as human, as not being inhuman. Ēthos is the open area where man welcomes, hosts, and maintains ‘what pertains to [his] essence, and what in thus arriving resides in nearness to him’. As such, ēthos is the territory where one’s way to be qua human unfolds. Evidently, the understanding of human essence is the prerequisite for comprehending how human beings comport themselves towards the world. Yet, Heidegger wants to avoid a non-metaphysical, phenomenological understanding of human essence and of humanism, one that would presuppose the affirmation of an objective order or truth, based on which we can ground our knowledge of human nature. According to Heidegger, metaphysical accounts of humanism obscure this question, because they foreground humanity to something else, ‘extra-human’. Rather, the non-metaphysical humanism that Heidegger envisages considers the property of being human not as contrasted to that of animal or god, but in its own terms: in terms of man’s embeddedness in the scheme of things, the fact that man cannot be separated from the world, human and non-human, in which he finds himself. This is an essential feature that Heidegger brings to the scrutiny for a political, worldly ēthos. Considering this inseparability of man and the world, ēthos refers not to a system of values, but rather to a non-axiological mode of relating to the scheme of things, in the sense of the concrete spatial and temporal circumstances in which one dwells.15 My reading of Heidegger suggests that he associates ēthos with the intimate, with the ontologically pertinent to human essence in its most common and ordinary aspect. Nonetheless, he does not connect ordinariness with normalcy or mediocrity (i.e., das Man). One’s ordinary abode, the region where one hosts what pertains to her human essence, is one that at the same time welcomes the unexpected, what can appear to this open dwelling place and stir her interest. The key word that leads me towards this expanding elucidation is another obscure term found in the saying under scrutiny: daimōn. Heidegger continues his inquiry in ‘original ethics’ by recounting a story which is originally found in Aristotle and which helps him to interpret the meaning of the polyvalent term daimōn. The key figure of the narrative is Heraclitus, who is found by a companion of visitors at the stove trying to

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warm himself, a view that frustrates and disappoints the strangers who expect a more glorious and perhaps less miserable view of one of the most famous thinkers of their times. However, the philosopher invites them to stay, using the words einai gar kai entautha theous: ‘here too the gods come to presence’. As Heidegger explains, the saying suggests that even at ‘a common and insignificant place’ such as a stove one can expect to experience ‘the exceptional and rare and so the exciting’; one can expect to find his daimōn.16 Etymologically meaning ‘the one who distributes or assigns a portion’, the term is used by Homer and other authors of his era synonymously with ‘god’ or ‘divinity’.17 It is in this sense that daimōn is also one’s destiny and fate, one’s quality of life. However, to have a daimōn does not entail that one does not have control over her own decisions; by contrast, it is the choices she makes and their consequences that define her life. Credence in the existence of daimōn does not imply belief in a transcendental function of the world. Indeed the Heraclitean god exists in the constant transformations and opposites of nature; it is immanent in the world.18 The daimōn, one might say, is employed in the saying to refer to the least familiar aspects of the world and its functions. Yet, Heraclitus grasps the world in its totality, that is without dividing it into binaries such as humans and non-humans or divine and mortal powers. In Heraclitean terms, the world already is this bipolarity, in a way that each of the world’s constituents already belongs to a relationship with others, participating in their definition. Their contestation does not aim to the extinction of the other, but is part of the world’s function, contributing to its balance. Heidegger shares with Heraclitus an immanent understanding of the functions of the world, at least to the extent that he rejects ‘outfitting man with an immortal soul, the power of reason, or the character of a person’.19 Clearly, Heidegger departs from the classical notion of ēthos as character, which proves too narrow to form the basis of a non-metaphysical ethics. As I will argue, one is human not due to any intrinsic characteristic, but in so far as she ek-sists as dweller in the world, not in order to secure a place for herself in it among a supposedly established true order of things, but rather in order to participate in the arrangement of an ever-changing scheme of things. The concept of daimōn plays an integral part in Heidegger’s efforts to ground his ethical inquiries on a non-metaphysical perception of the world and enables him also to embrace the idea of the holy without reducing it to a certain theism. The humanitas of Heidegger’s man does not contradict the divinity of god. Like Heraclitus, Heidegger appeals to daimōn as the immanent power that influences human affairs, in the form of the tangible truths that participate in the arrangement or negotiation of human affairs. To find one’s daimōn is to meet the exciting in the most common, habitual place. In a sense, Heidegger suggests that man is human insofar as he takes care of what



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is familiar, that is human affairs. It is our ‘way to be’ towards human affairs that defines our humanism; therefore, to be human, Heidegger explains, is to take care of what arrives to our nearness. The essence of humanitas lies in the way that man is and that man thinks of being; it lies in how man ‘thinks’ his being in the world. Heidegger’s discussion of human essence suggests that man qua human cannot exist segregated from the world. Indeed, man becomes capable of understanding himself, ‘what’ and ‘who’ he is, only by interacting with what is in his proximity. Ēthos is one’s territory, the place which ‘first yields the experience of something we can hold on to’.20 There is a sense of familiarity implicit in ēthos, as with the archaic ēthea, the places of safe return for human and non-human animals. Yet, rather than understanding this territory as a non-permeable terrain that one occupies and possesses, Heidegger – through Heraclitus – invites us to affirm it as the terrain that one explores through a process of exchange with what ‘resides in nearness to him’. Heidegger grasps ēthos not as a restricted topos but as an open terrain, thus bridging the archaic nomes, the fields of freedom, with the haunts, the spaces of delimitation and security; ēthos becomes the place where we can start creating ‘something we can hold on to’. By the end of his discussion, Heidegger has interpreted Heraclitus as saying: ‘The (familiar) abode for man is the open region for the presencing of god (the unfamiliar one)’.21 Even though the daimōn denotes something that initially is unfamiliar, in the sense of the unknown, unpredictable, and even antithetical to one’s ordinary condition, it is still possible to acknowledge, explore, understand, and embrace it. It is by remaining open to different encounters and occurrences, by inviting and hosting them at one’s most familiar and ordinary condition, that one comes to know herself and the world. One’s abode or ēthos does not need to denote a place already assigned to her, an established and permanent condition or set of actions and traits; it can be the starting point of reference from which she engages with the world. Therefore, one’s ēthos does not remain fixed and predictable; through these explorations it is transformed and adjusted, becoming each time a new departure point that encompasses what has already been experienced. It is a way of engaging with the world. In what follows, I would like to make this shift from topos to the process of dwelling more explicit; ēthos is a dynamic dwelling, a process of engaging with what appears to one’s nearness. ĒTHOS-AS-DWELLING The expanding reading of Heidegger’s account of ēthos that I attempt here resonates with, and is reinforced by, his reflections on dwelling found in

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‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ (1951). In this essay Heidegger continues his inquiry into the essence of being human which, once again, he connects with the capacity of dwelling and thinking, but this time also with that of building, primarily because his concern in this essay is with a particular form of scarcity, namely post-war housing shortage. Heidegger seeks to restore the lost connection between the three terms that appear in the title of his essay, explaining that in German the word ‘being’ is etymologically already associated with and implicit in both building and dwelling; there is a continuity between the practice of building and that of dwelling and this relation of continuity is an essential part of being. However, this sequence has fallen silent, Heidegger argues. To build, he advocates, is to dwell, to be in a certain way, while ‘the manner in which we humans are on the earth is [. . .] dwelling. To be a human being means to be on the earth as a mortal. It means to dwell’.22 Dwelling entails openness and is the very essence of being human, in line with what Heidegger has already suggested in his ‘Letter on Humanism’. Nonetheless, in ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ Heidegger further advances his assertion of dwelling as the essence of being. He clarifies that dwelling is a practice and more specifically an act of cherishing and protecting, preserving and caring for. The aspect of care folded in dwelling seems to be crucial, not least because to dwell is to remain at peace with the open and free abode in which things ‘naturally’ are; it is to respect and preserve this space. More specifically, to dwell is to spare and preserve the scheme of things that Heidegger calls ‘the fourfold’: the oneness of earth, the sky, mortals, and divinities, each different but implicit in the other, while all participate in a unity.23 Echoing again Heraclitus, who held a cosmological view according to which all is one yet ever-changing, Heidegger observes that everything – and so nature, human culture, and belief systems – belongs to a single whole. To dwell, then, is to affirm that to be human, and consequently to be mortal, is to be an integral part of the oneness of ‘the fourfold’; it is to experience the world as the only source of making-sense of life. To be human is to be unable to live detached from ‘the fourfold’. The idea of dwelling, then, entails a certain degree of connectedness with the world, as well as an affirmation of the interconnectedness of the elements that belong to the scheme of things. As Jeff Malpas explains, dwelling as preserving entails one’s ability to situate oneself to the question of being, of existing as human, but also the ability to affirm the fourfold as ‘a gathering of difference in the unity that belongs to it’, and therefore the ability to embrace finitude and boundedness. To be human, to act in a humane way, is to remain responsive to the exigencies that mould one’s being on earth.24 A non-metaphysical humanism as the one espoused by Heidegger can inform a worldly ēthos, not least because it endorses as the determining factor of an object’s or being’s nature not value, but rather its possibilities for



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becoming. When something is assessed in terms of its value, then it is ‘admitted only as an object for man’s estimation. . . Every valuing, even where it values positively, is a subjectivizing’.25 What my reading of Heidegger suggests is that whereas in the ‘Letter on Humanism’ the essence of being human is identified with thinking, namely with the capacity to think and understand the truth of Being, in ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ his humanism is extended to the capacity to dwell, to exist inseparable from the spatial, as well as temporal, contexts in which Being is found; the content of these contexts cannot be reduced to merely human constituents.26 The way of thinking and dwelling that establishes this relation between the human and non-human world is ‘letting things be’. As espoused in ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, to dwell while ‘letting things be’ is not to exist in the world in a condition of inertia or negligence. Dwelling, instead, is the activity of preserving the world; it is a form of dynamic engagement with the world. To dwell is to remain, to stay in a place, and more distinctly to remain in peace with something, to accept it, and through this acceptance to spare it. This sparing is, according to Heidegger, the fundamental character that pervades dwelling in its whole range.27 To ‘let things be’ is not a form of being apathetic towards something; it is an activity. As Thiele clarifies, the idea of ‘letting things be’ is not to be understood in the sense of abandonment but in that of forming ‘dynamic worldly relationships, ones all the more dynamic because they are no longer constrained by the limitations of a subject/object dichotomy’.28 For Heidegger, it is this kind of dwelling that is the ontological essence of being human. One is human because one is a dweller, that is because she has the capacity to dwell while preserving and sparing, while letting things be as they ‘naturally’ are, and therefore while embracing and accepting her place in ‘the fourfold’. It is not only one’s mortality and finitude that defines her humanity, but also her capacity to take care of world affairs. Yet, care alone cannot foster democratic arrangements. CONCLUSION: AN ETHOTIC DWELLING My reading of Heidegger suggests that the notion of ēthos is not exhausted to the mode of existence that is characterized by care for a complex, interconnected world. Heidegger also invokes the significance of thinking on the given order and the challenges that it poses on beings. Yet, merely reflecting on the given order and demonstrating care for it is not enough to forge democratic ways of co-existence, or to open ‘other vistas’, as Heidegger aspires for his non-metaphysical ethics. Care can take many forms and it can indeed be a central principle of democratic political life, forging the possibility of

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a more positive conduct towards what is in our nearness, both human and non-human. Yet, a life in common, a political life that is organized democratically, is first and foremost one that is infused with the logic of justice. The experience of injustice, but also the effort to transform it into justice, is constitutive moments of political life. As Sheldon Wolin puts it, such experiences serve ‘as moments for the demos to think, to reflect, per chance, to construct themselves as actors’.29 A conceptualization of ēthos in the form proposed here, as a way of inhabiting the world and engaging with it, nurtures such an encounter with in/justice and can, therefore, be a productive force in demotic life. It is in the ancient Greek concept of dikē that the content of justice that I am looking for here is to be found. Not because I favour the godfearing disposition or the teleological understanding of ethics that we find in the archaic era, but because I find that dikē can inform a worldly account of justice that relates to the environmental problem and more specifically to its aspect that we affirm as natural resources scarcity. The urge to address natural resources scarcity is one of the issues that underlie pressures for justice in late modernity (and even more in the socalled Global Age). This particular form of scarcity is frequently seen as imposing a series of ecological issues on the human estate, whereas at the same time it also challenges democracy as organizational system and way of life, not least because it increases inequality, conflict, authoritarianism, and repression.30 Furthermore, the notion of ecological scarcity is implicated today in the calls for adjusting human activity to the actual physical realities of the biosphere, the interactive complex of living things and the atmosphere, oceans, and soils.31 Indeed, Rockström et al propose the theory of planetary boundaries, according to which the transgression of the nine biophysical thresholds or planetary boundaries could have disastrous outcomes for humanity.32 Therefore, the proponents of the theory argue, we need to impose strict limitations on human activities in order to secure a safe operating space for humanity. Scarcity forms a fixed point from which we encounter our ecological predicament today. Yet, this particular perspective does not exhaust the complexity of the problem. This is not to suggest that the earth systems are not running out of water or fossil fuels; rather, it is to suggest that perhaps a more effective response can be drawn if we change our perspective of the problem. I do not propose that ēthos provides a solution here. However, I believe that a response to this, as well as other challenges, may begin with or be underscored by a positive ēthos of care and justice. One way to address our ecological predicament, then, would be to begin relating to it by ceasing to see the biosphere as a source of extraction and consumption and by beginning to approach it as part of our being. This is why and how the notion of dwelling becomes relevant here.



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The understanding of ēthos that I argue for, affirmed as a mode of dwelling in the world, is a political ethic formulated not as a set of principles of conduct, but as a way of relating to the human and non-human world. At the same time it is also a way of embracing our role within it, especially in relation to the world’s other elements. To say that our engagement with the exigencies of the world is infused by an ēthos-as-dwelling is to suggest that our responses to daily encounters, or lack thereof, is indicative of the way we perceive of and occupy the open region we live in; it is indicative of our care for the world. At the same time, though, it is also indicative of our stance towards injustice. To place ourselves towards problems of injustice in the world, such as the one that I will shortly attend to, is to think of the current state of affairs with the mood to transform it; it is to inhabit the world in a political way. The argument for ēthos-as-dwelling that I advance here is permeated by the idea that humanitas, the essence of being human and not inhuman, entails being in the world politically. We are human and not inhuman (and not non-human) insofar as we demonstrate care for the world, by seeking to preserve and spare it; in Heideggerian terms, by dwelling in it. I concur with Heidegger that the demonstration of care is part and parcel of humanitas, the essence of being human. However, unlike him, my aim is not to inquire into the essence of being per se. The reason that I am drawn to the idea of humanitas is because I want to emphasize the role that the human estate plays and can play in critically engaging with the ecological problem, by finding ways to address both its causes and its effects. By attending to humanitas I do not presuppose human beings’ superiority over all organic and inorganic life; neither do I imply that acting politically is a capacity exclusive to them.33 My purpose of visiting the idea of humanitas, rather, is to demonstrate how the quality of being human, as contrasted with the inhumane, is inextricably linked with the idea of care for the world. But I want to further suggest that so is dikē, the account of justice that is associated with balance or proportion. To be politically qua human, I argue, is to dwell, to care for the world and to seek to fold dikē in the scheme of things. In other words, to dwell in the world politically is to care for and engage with world affairs in a responsive way, that is by endeavouring to forge a just, more balanced, less exploitative and less hubristic arrangement of things. If, as Heidegger proposes, in order to understand what it means to exist ethically, we first need to grasp what it means to be human without falling for a redundant anthropocentrism, a code of conduct, or a blind belief in a divine design, then dikē has a distinct place in our visions of a life in common. This is because dikē, in the sense discussed here, allows us to develop relationships with the world without engaging it as an external entity with its own limits, which then keep it separated from human beings and which the latter can trespass. That said, my approach still accounts for political activism as deployed

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specifically by human beings; yet, my concern with the human capacity to be and act politically does not aim to emphasize the differences between human and non-human components of the world, but rather between human and inhumane courses of action. Despite the need to decentre human beings from the political stage in order to attain a more inclusive perspective of political agency and practice, a softened account of the place of human beings in a world under pressure by human activity can help to bridge this need and the urgency to embrace the idea of human accountability, if a meaningful account of transformative political action is to be nurtured. To be sure, the indiscriminate use of the term anthropos to refer to the prime agent of change in the Anthropocene and the subsequent implication that the human species is responsible for the environmental crisis, is fundamentally problematic. As Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, however anthropogenic the current environmental changes may be, there is no corresponding unified agent, a ‘humanity’, that can confront them by acting as a political agent. This lack of a proper political agent underscores the urgency ‘to think of the human on multiple scales and registers and as having both ontological and non-ontological modes of existence’, Chakrabarty explains.34 My discussion of anthropos as dweller here is towards this direction. Essentially, our understanding of the meaning of the term ‘humanity’ need not have as its starting point a binary logic that specifically contrasts human with non-human beings. Such a logic obscures the possibility of a more balanced, that is a more positive and creative, engagement with the scheme of things, which does not result to the depletion of natural resources. If for the Romans the homo humanus acquired its meaning from its contrast with homo barbarus, in an age when anthropos has been elevated to the central problem and point of reference for the environmental problem, humanitas can be perceived as the mode of existence that aspires to prevent the invocation of further injustice against the world’s other elements, both animate and inanimate. This injustice takes the form of transgressing the boundaries of the place that anthropos has in the world and manifests in ways of operation that cause environmental destruction or place additional pressure on specific parts of the human population. The struggle to forge a less uneven state of affairs between human and non-human environments, the fight against the intensive exploitation of exhaustible natural resources such as fossil fuels, as well as the effort to develop alternative visions of human organization that challenge the devastating obsession with growth and profitability, are all domains where the notion of anthropos and that of justice merge. The amalgamation of justice and humanism that I advocate here is nowhere illustrated better than in the world of ancient Greek tragedies. In this world, the man who exceeds his measure commits hubris and is punished by the Erinyes. Tragedy is a universe of ‘pity and fear’, where the prevailing norm



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of action is justice, frequently restored by a deus ex machina. However, as Aristotle explains, the deus ex machina should be employed only for events external to the drama, for example those that a person could not have known.35 It is to man and his knowledge and capacity that we should turn in order to respond to the events that define our human reality. If anthropos and his actions have defined an era and its functions to the extent that we live in the Anthropocene, then the solution to the problems caused in it should begin nowhere but from anthropos. The concept of dikē invokes the idea of human accountability and at the same time resists anthropocentrism in the scheme of things, by registering at public life the tragic logic of making justice in order to avoid hubris. To operate while bearing in mind dikē is to not overstep the bounds. In contrast to the heroic image of unlimited self-assertion as the criterion of moral excellence, the Delphic dictate mēden agan, nothing in excess, provided a guiding principle for behaviour in a world where divine and natural powers intermeshed and human existence was an inseparable part of a world of continuous cosmic and social strife.36 Humanitas, the essence of being human, entails to dwell in the world while letting things be, without thinking and valuing them exclusively as resources, without overstepping the limit of our role in the scheme of things, that is without invoking hubris. To be with other human beings – Heidegger’s miteinandersein – is to already be in ‘the fourfold’, to take care of not to disrupt it by assuming human superiority in it; it is to do justice to the scheme of things. Today we tend to equate justice to legal settlement, or attribute to it a moral significance, by understanding it as fairness. Justice is, indeed, an ambivalent term. Yet, it is in these early ancient references, where it is interpreted as balance, as proportion, that we can find a sense of justice that does not rely on any particular moral or religious meta-interpretation of justice. To reinforce justice, or dikē, is to seek to avoid disaster by resorting to a sense of proportion and hence to the fleeting, visceral perception of balance that guides judgment.37 In fact, the idea of justice as dikē draws on a non-anthropocentric cosmic order, indeed one where it is the non-human that sets the scene for the role of balance in the function of the world. As such, it is a norm that extends from nature to human societies, a norm that once transgressed invokes some form of punishment. In an era when the cosmological and the social order were seen as inseparable, the invocation of hubris had destructive outcomes for the lives of human and non-human beings. So when Heraclitus states that not even the sun will dare to overstep his measure, otherwise the Erinyes will find him out, he is literally referring to the primitive fear of the sun failing to rise.38 Hubris concerns both human and non-human components of the world. Dikē is not dependent upon established laws and legal settlements; its meaning flows from the primordial idea that balance is the essential element that

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enables the survival of the universe. To pursue dikē is to appeal to balance, to proportion. In this sense, then, dikē is situational justice; not justice that is already in place, in the form of laws, contracts and principles, but one that is fleeting and remains open to be defined and re-appropriated. Hence it does not necessarily aim at the preservation of the existing order, neither is it committed to some abstract idea of change. I find that this notion of justice, as dikē, is particularly pertinent to the ecological problem, as well as to the possibility to tune in a political response to it, without finding recourse to theories of planetary boundaries. Despite its usefulness in framing the problem in a way that is observable, and therefore understandable and subject to confrontation, there is a fundamental pitfall with this argument and with the very idea of the limits of the biosphere. This approach to the problem does not only explicitly suggest that the functions of the earth systems have somehow transgressed their limits, hence downplaying any human accountability in this development; it also contributes to the perpetuation of the derogatory image of the biosphere as a complex of resources that can be exploited but not over-used or abused. In the end, this argument and the ideas that sustain it foreclose the possibility of transformative action against the environmental crisis by narrowing down our options for action to managing and planning resources and their limits. The notion of dikē as advocated here enables us to inscribe an alternative vision for our environmental future, one that goes beyond an encounter with scarcity. This is not to advocate that balance is the organizing or functioning principle of nature, though. Indeed, the persistence of the myth of the balance of nature, explicated also in pre-Socratic cosmology, seems to accelerate the problem, at least to the extend that it facilitates in public conscience the affirmation of nature as a system with the capacity to bounce back and restore its insufficiencies. In practice, the biosphere appears to have some capacity for self-organization, at least in a geochemical or geophysical way.39 This is primarily due to the dynamic mode of interaction between its different components. Nonetheless, despite this interdependence, the assemblage of ecological systems that comprise the earth is not in a mode of equilibrium. There is no actual, measurable state in nature in which interdependent populations are in balance, at least not in the sense that the extinction of a certain species will be somehow counter-balanced by the appearance of another; nature can be described as changing and vulnerable, but not as balanced.40 Interdependence does not equal equilibrium. What the notion of dikē can contribute to the visions and narratives that frame and sustain our response to the environmental crisis, and the series of political problems that are associated with it, is a different understanding of our relation to the problem. Today human beings encounter the planetary problem as one that takes place in the biosphere, failing to embrace the fact



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they themselves are already part of the biosphere and therefore part of the problem. They commit hubris against the earth systems not because they have disturbed some supposedly natural balance, some existing equilibrium, but rather because they have failed to embrace their own role as a mere component of the scheme of things. Human beings have become oblivious to the interconnectedness of the things that compose the scheme of which they are part; they have failed, in other words, to grasp the wholeness of ‘the fourfold’. To do justice to earth and its elements is first and foremost to impose limits to oneself, by beginning to think anew one’s place in the scheme of things. To operate while considering and aspiring to dikē is to not exceed the bounds; it is to seek to avoid hubris. But these are not the bounds of the biosphere, but of the place of the human estate in it. Extending the argument that has been advanced so far in the chapter, human beings are dwellers – in Heideggerian terms – not merely because we live on earth, under the sky, as mortals who hold certain values. Rather, we are dwellers because we are infused with an ēthos-as-dwelling, that is because we remain responsive to the limits of our role in the biosphere. These limits, as Heidegger proposes, do not designate where something stops; rather, they are the boundaries from which something begins its presencing.41 Today, sparing the biosphere is not merely about preserving it, letting it be; it is about starting to think of how the established state of affairs is out of bounds and to aspire to forge a different, more just relation with the other components of the biosphere. An ēthos infused by care and justice affirmed as dikē is particularly pertinent to the challenges of the Global Age and the anthropogenic environmental changes that characterize it. Such an ēthos, I argue, advances not merely sparing, but rather a more affirmative form of engagement as a mode of relating with the world. Heidegger points to the act of sparing as the distinguishing trait of human dwelling, as the attribute that infuses one’s dwelling in the world as human. The notion of dwelling while sparing is useful, because it urges us to not seek to leave the world in some supposed condition of balance, but rather to engage it while affirming that humans are merely one component of ‘the fourfold’. We are dwellers because we spare things, we struggle against environmental destruction and we respond to the urgency to deal with it; and we do so not by respecting the limits of biosphere, but rather by ceasing to see the biosphere as an assemblage of resources and by beginning to affirm our own limits within it. But furthermore, we are dwellers in so far as we seek to engage the world in order to do justice to it, to forge a more just relation between the biosphere’s different components. As dwellers we remain receptive to what arrives to our abode and vigilant to occurrences that surround us in order to respond to them, to take care of them. We do not merely exist on earth under the sky, before the divinities,

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among mortals; we do so while we ‘stay with things’. To stay with things, to show concern for things, to let things be: Heidegger shows a way for engaging the world not in order to value its components and then master them, but in order to inhabit it with care for what is and what will be. We ‘let things be’ by not approaching them with exploitation in mind, that is by not attributing a particular value to them. To do so is to refuse to measure things for some usefulness they can have for us, and hence by taking them as things in their own value, in their own use. But, we should add, our staying with things entails at the same time the attitude to challenge established allocations of roles, priorities, or use of means. To dwell in the world politically is, among other things, to be involved not in the ongoing struggle for a more just distribution of scarce resources, but rather in transformative actions that inscribe new narratives, examples and visions, beyond the idea of natural scarcity or planetary boundaries. NOTES * A different version of this chapter has appeared in Sophia Hatzisavvidou, Appearances of Ēthos in Political Thought: The Dimension of Practical Reason (London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). The author would like to thank Rowman & Littlefield for allowing the use of the material in this study. 1 See Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, ‘The “Anthropocene” ’, Global Change Newsletter 41 (May 2000): 17–18. 2 Homer, The Iliad, trans. Richard Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951). 3 Hesiod and Theognis, Hesiod: Works and Days and Theogon – Theognis: Elegies, trans. Dorothea Wender (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973). 4 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 122. 5 Jacques Rancière, ‘The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics’, in Dissensus on Politics and Aesthetics, ed. Steven Corcoran (London and New York: Continuum, 2010), 184. 6 Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2013), 6. 7 On this, see Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism, ed. Joseph Margolis and Tom Rockmore, trans. Paul Burrell (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991); Jürgen Habermas, ‘Work and Weltanschauung: The Heidegger Controversy from A German Perspective’, in Heidegger: A Critical Reader, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Harrison Hall (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1992), 186–208; and Richard Wolin, The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993). The publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks in 2015 leaves little flexibility for the interpretation of the political aspect of his works.



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See Ingo Farin and Jeff Malpas, eds., Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks 1931–1941 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016). 8 As Young clarifies, the concept of ‘destitute time’ refers to the time of unprecedented anxiety for human beings, which is the result of the combination of the loss of god and existential dwelling, the inability to ‘own’ death and the ‘violence’ of technology. As I discuss in this chapter, Heidegger addresses the loss of god by finding recourse, through Heraclitus, to a more immanent understanding of what a god is, an understanding which is an integral part of his attempt to formulate a non-metaphysical ethics. Cf. Julian Young, Heidegger’s Later Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 31 and ff. 9 Martin Heidegger, Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, trans. Robert D. Metcalfe and Mark B. Tanzer (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009), 48. 10 Although it has been argued (and indeed it is widely accepted) that after die Kehre, his ‘turning’, the essence of being misses its prominent place in Heidegger’s work, I concur with Hemming that, rather than abandoning the temporal and existential analytic of Dasein, Heidegger indeed continues to fold this particular search in his later work. Cf. Laurence P. Hamming, ‘Speaking out of Turn: Martin Heidegger and die Kehre’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies 6, no. 3 (1998): 393–423. 11 Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1977), 224. Hans Seigfried helps us to locate the ‘Letter’ in its historical context and to understand Heidegger’s interest in humanism. In October 1946, while the first executions for ‘crimes against humanity’ were carried out, Heidegger was involved in denazification hearings at the University of Freiburg with regard to his support of a regime that had committed ‘inhuman acts’. Amid these conditions, was it still meaningful to talk about humanism at all? And how was it possible to assess man’s involvement with the scheme of things in terms of distinguishing between good and evil? Heidegger was under pressure, not least because it was time to demonstrate concretely if and how his phenomenological account of human existence can help us to make sense of these ‘inhuman acts’ and to save future generations from such inhumanity. See Hans Seigfried, ‘Heidegger at the Nuremberg Trials: The “Letter on Humanism” Revisited’, in Martin Heidegger and the Holocaust, ed. Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg (Atlantic Heights, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996). 12 Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, 256. 13 Charles H. Khan, ‘Presocratic Greek Ethics’, in A History of Western Ethics, ed. Lawrence C. Becker and Charlotte B. Becker (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 81. 14 Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, 257. 15 Heidegger himself criticized the notion of value, a concept introduced to philosophical thought from economics, as well as its use to assign meaning to beings and actions. As he wrote, ‘In the nineteenth century, talk of values became frequent, and it became customary to think in values. However, it was only as a consequence of the broadcasting of Nietzsche’s writings that talk of values has become popular. [. . .] Value and what is valuable are turned into a positivistic substitute for the

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metaphysical.’ Cf. Martin Heidegger, ‘Nietzsche’s Word: “God Is dead”’, in Off the Beaten Track, ed. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 169–170. I would like to thank Antonio Cerella for bringing this important point to my attention. 16 Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, 257. 17 Khan, ‘Presocratic Greek Ethics’, 261. 18 Geoffrey S. Kirk, Heraclitus: The Cosmic Fragments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 166. 19 Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, 262. 20 Ibid., 256. 21 Ibid., 258. 22 Martin Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1971), 145. 23 Ibid., 148. 24 Jeff Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 277. 25 Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, 251. 26 Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, 147. 27 Ibid. 28 Leslie P. Thiele, ‘Heidegger’s Freedom: Political Not Metaphysical’, The American Political Science Review 88, no. 2 (1994): 214. 29 Sheldon S. Wolin, ‘The Liberal/Democratic Divide: On Rawls’s Political Liberalism’, Political Theory 24, no. 1 (1996): 106. 30 See Kurt Fisterbusch, ‘Scarcity and Its Social Impacts: Likely Political Responses’, in On the Edge of Scarcity: Environment, Resources, Population, Sustainability, and Conflict, ed. Michael N. Dobkowski and Isidor Wallimann (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2002), 93. 31 See David Schwartzman, Life, Temperature, and the Earth: The Self-Organising Biosphere (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 32 Johan Rockström et al., ‘Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity’, Ecology and Society 14, no. 2 (2009): 472–75. 33 On the political capacity of nonhuman, organic and inorganic, agents or actants, see Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); and Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. 34 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change’, New Literary History 43, no. 1 (2012): 14. 35 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. George Whalley (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 1454b. 36 Khan, ‘Presocratic Greek Ethics’, 2. 37 V. A. Rodgers, ‘Some Thoughts on AIKH’, The Classical Quarterly 21, no. 3 (1971): 289–91. 38 Cf. Kahn, ‘Presocratic Greek Ethics’, 161. This is not so much of a primordial premonition, though. Evidently, the Stelliferous era as we know it today is just one among the many ages of the universe. It certainly gives us comfort to know that the



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sun will rise tomorrow, every tomorrow, and in many years to come after we no longer exist; however the sun will not shine forever. The hydrogen stored in its core will eventually be exhausted and although this is a very, very distant eventuality, its probability demonstrates the logic implicit in Heraclitus’s aphorism. For an informative and accessible discussion, see Fred C. Adams and Greg Laughlin, The Five Ages of the Universe: Inside the Physics of Eternity (New York: The Free Press, 1999). 39 Schwartzman, Life, Temperature, and the Earth, 159. 40 See John Kricher, The Balance of Nature: Ecology’s Enduring Myth (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009). 41 Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, 152.

Chapter 11

A Universal Right to Politics Thinking Heidegger’s Gelassenheit in the Age of the Global Refugee Crisis Peg Birmingham In his essay ‘What is a Politics of the Rights of Man?’, Étienne Balibar notes that the contemporary globalized world is governed by the capitalist ideology of the free mobility of capital and goods, but not the free movement of labour. This leads to the paradox that social-political spaces are economically open to the world, yet closed from the point of view of citizenship and political rights, the latter remaining bound to the sovereign will of the nation state.1 One has only to open up the morning newspapers to grasp the validity of this claim as thousands of refugees, fleeing the violence of both war and economic conditions wrought by global capital, seek asylum only to discover that state borders are closed to all but those who have their citizenship papers in order. In June 2016, the UN agency on refugees put the figure of forcibly displaced persons at more than 65 million globally, compared to 59.5 million just twelve months earlier.2 Certainly there are countries providing entry to some of the forcibly displaced; however, it is in the form of hospitality and not of political rights. The trouble with the hospitable invitation is that it is limited and can be revoked at any time. If I invite you to my dinner party, I expect that you will not decide to extend the invitation to a week-long stay; at the same time, if you do not act well at my table, I will most likely find a way to end the party early. Invitations are precarious – anything can happen when it comes to hospitality. Which is why, in my view, places of hospitality such as Derrida describes, while certainly much needed as what we might call ethical places of temporary residence, do not substitute for political rights. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, herself a refugee fleeing from Nazi Germany, points out that at the very moment when protection under the auspices of universal human rights was most desperately needed, no such protection was granted. Outside the law and not belonging to any 253

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political community, she and her fellow refugees were reduced to ‘mere naked human beings’ in a ‘condition of complete rightlessness’.3 Her time as a refugee led Arendt to rethink human rights, arguing that human rights cannot be simply the rights of a citizen; instead, what is revealed through the stateless refugees is a more fundamental right, the universal right to belong to a political community. She calls this fundamental right the ‘right to have rights’ or the universal right to politics: ‘We became aware of the existence of a right to have rights. . . the right to belong to some kind of organized community, only when millions of people emerged who had lost and could not regain these rights because of the new global political situation’.4 She goes on to describe this new global political situation as one in which ‘suddenly, there was no place on earth where refugees could go without the severest restriction, no country where they would be assimilated, no territory where they could found a new community of their own. This, moreover, had next to nothing to do with any material problem of overpopulation; it was a problem not of space but of political organization’.5 For Arendt the political organization that prevents refugees and the stateless from losing and not regaining rights is the problem of the nation state that limits human rights to citizens of a nation state. She argues that in the modern era, despite the claim of the universality of human rights, rights are limited to those who belong to the unified powerful will of a sovereign nation state. The notion of a sovereign, unified, and thereby powerful will is tied to a long tradition that has its origins in Augustine for whom the problem of being able to act, or more precisely, the inability to act, is tied to a divided will. This is his dilemma in the Confessions: ‘I will and I cannot’.6 A powerful will is therefore possible only if the will is one with itself. Arendt points out that this conception of power, located in a unified will, is precisely the conception of power developed in modern political theory, a fact that has serious consequences for the modern formulation of human rights. Indeed, Arendt argues that the modern understanding of the self as a subject who is the bearer of inalienable rights is inseparable from the notion of the sovereign nation state that gets its power from the sovereign general will of the people. Human rights, then, are tied up with the question of national emancipation. In this schema, power is always associated with sovereignty and unity – either the unified sovereign will of the individual or the unity of the sovereign general will embodied in the figure of the ruler. To go further, the sovereign will of the nation is unified through a common language, a common history, and a common territory whose borders are the places of inclusion and exclusion.7 Again, those who are not nationals, those outside the territorial borders of nation states, belong nowhere and have nowhere to go; they are therefore outside the protection of human rights.



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Certainly the global political situation described by Arendt has only worsened since she wrote her scathing critique of human rights in 1948. In the face of extreme state violence that has produced over 60 million forcibly displaced persons, the task of thinking the ‘right to have rights’ has never been so urgent. Most importantly for this global situation, Arendt’s ‘right to have rights’ makes the claim of a universal right to politics insofar as rights are always political rights. Therefore, the right to have rights makes the claim of a universal right to politics. The universal right to politics demands a new conception of citizenship. Radically critiquing the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, which reduces the universality of human rights to the rights of particular citizens of sovereign nation states, Arendt suggests that a truly universal declaration of rights must rethink the citizen as constituted through the activity of establishing the universal. I will return to this in the conclusion of the chapter. At the same time, how do we justify a universal right to politics? While there may be a universal right to politics (and this still needs to be articulated), politics itself is never universal. Politics, in other words, is defined by borders and boundaries. As Arendt points out, ‘a citizen is by definition a citizen among citizens of a country among countries; his rights and duties must be defined and limited not only by those of his fellow citizens but also by the boundaries of a territory’.8 A world without borders or demarcations is a world of one government and such a globalized unified government is terrifying. If borders – places of demarcation between inside and outside, included and excluded – are an inescapable condition of politics, necessary for the very institution of the political, then the claim of a universal right to politics seems to destroy the very concept of politics. My suggestion is that a universal right to politics is not destructive; rather it is aporetic; it is a right that contains both the claim to universality and to particularity, that is a universal right to belong to a particular political community. At the register of the universal, the right to politics is rooted in a universal claim of ‘belonging’ to a space of appearance; what we might call a ‘right to appearance’. This last leads me to Heidegger. I submit that his thought, despite at times its tendency towards an ontological nationalism rooted in the Greek and German language, gives us resources to think this universal ‘belonging’ to a space of appearance as the ‘jointure’ (Fug) of a plurality of beings. In other words, I submit that Heidegger’s notion Gelassenheit or ‘letting be’ is a radical rethinking of belonging, one no longer tied to an individual or sovereign will. This, in turn, allows for thinking a universal right to politics. I want to pause here and consider the relation between Heidegger’s and Arendt’s respective thought. The often told narrative is one of contrast in which Heidegger is the thinker of mortality and being-toward-death, while Arendt is

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the thinker of natality and our capacity for beginning something new through speech and action. Yet a note Arendt sends Heidegger on the occasion of the publication of Vita Activa, the German edition of The Human Condition, suggests that this often repeated narrative is, quite simply, not true. Arendt writes: You will see that the book does not contain a dedication. Had things worked out properly between us – and I mean between, that is, neither you nor me – I would have asked you if I might dedicate it to you; it came directly out of the first Freiburg days and hence owes practically everything to you in every respect.9

Important here is Arendt’s self-understanding that everything in her book devoted to the question of action ‘came directly out of the first Freiburg days and hence owes practically everything’ in every respect to Heidegger’s lectures on Plato’s Sophist, which Arendt attended in the 1924–1925 winter semester. The tone of Arendt’s note suggests, again contrary to the familiar narrative, that Heidegger did not respond to Arendt’s The Human Condition not because he disagreed with her claims regarding the vita activa, but because of their fraught personal relationship. Not only does Heidegger’s thought mark the beginning of Arendt’s thinking, it also marks its end. Arendt’s commentary on Heidegger’s reading of Anaximander is the last fully finished piece she wrote before her death in 1975. What is it that Arendt learned from Heidegger such that his thought bookends her thinking? Recalling that Arendt thinks action as inseparable from a space of freedom and power, a political space of acting in concert with a plurality of others for the sake of something new, then what she takes from those early Freiburg days is a notion of action that is severed entirely from a sovereign, autonomous, powerful will, either individual or national. Instead action and power are understood from out of a space of appearing. Arendt returns to this ‘space’ or ‘region’ of appearing in her reading of Heidegger’s essay on Anaximander. In what follows, I argue that Arendt’s notion of a ‘universal right to politics’ emerges at least in part from Heidegger’s notion of a ‘region’ or a ‘space’ of appearance. This last gives us a radically different notion of political belonging, one no longer rooted in a notion of a sovereign will, but rather, in a notion of power as ‘enabling’ regions of openness (Gegnet) where boundaries are places of jointure of what is always out of order and out of joint. HEIDEGGER’S SOPHIST LECTURES: ON THE RELATION OF THE ONTOLOGICAL TO THE POLITICAL To clarify at the outset, I am not suggesting that Heidegger gives us a politics of political belonging; instead, I am arguing that he gives us resources to think the universality of this claim of a universal right to politics. In other



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words, I am proposing that Heidegger gives us the ontological presuppositions at work in the universal claim of the right to have rights. In so doing, his ontology gives us a concept of belonging that may promote a politics of the universal rights of man, to use the title of Étienne Balibar’s essay referenced at the outset of this chapter. As already mentioned, Arendt explicitly acknowledges her debt to Heidegger’s lectures on Plato’s Sophist given in the winter semester of 1924–1925. Recalling Arendt’s task in The Human Condition is to ‘think what we are doing’, I suggest that her debt lies primarily in Heidegger’s extensive commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, specifically the relation between phronesis and sophia, that is the relation between practical judgment of the particular situation and the capacity to grasp the being of the whole at work in the particular situation. More precisely, Arendt’s debt lies in Heidegger’s claim that Aristotle’s notion of phronesis is a mode of sophia, at once particular and universal. Rooted in the concreteness of the particular concrete situation, nonetheless phronesis discloses the whole in view of which the particular is disclosed more fundamentally. Heidegger’s concern in the first part of his lectures is the relation between the universal and the concrete level of experience or, more precisely, between the ontological and the ethical-political. Briefly, Heidegger’s discussion of Aristotle, from which Arendt took so much, is a reflection of the movement through the concrete to the universal. As Heidegger puts it: Φρόνησις is the inspection . . . of the concrete momentariness of the transient situation. As αἴσθησις, it is a look of an eye in the blink of an eye (Augenblick), a momentary look at what is momentarily concrete, which as such can always be otherwise. . . . On the basis of their being related to the ἀρχαί, both φρόνησις and σοφία are the highest possibilities of the disclosure of beings themselves. Insofar as they are modes of Dasein, they constitute its mode of Being: σοφία is Dasein’s positionality towards the beings of the world in the full sense. Φρόνησις is Dasein’s positionality toward the beings which are themselves Dasein.10

To translate Augenblick as ‘look of an eye’ is to miss its double sense of sight/site as both vision and place. A better translation is ‘moment of insight’, capturing Dasein’s dwelling in and grasping its concrete possibilities, a dwelling that is always a historical conjunction that is both temporal and spatial. At the same time, phronesis is not separate from grasping a sense of the universal at work in these concrete possibilities. Sophia is already rooted in phronesis insofar as phronesis concerns the existence of the whole as it is disclosed in the concrete praxis of human existence. Yet, there is a disjunction between phronesis and sophia. The disclosure of

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the universal is never fully given in the circumspective sight of phronesis. The moment of in-sight (Augenblick) is an open horizon without specific content. As a result, the moment of in-sight does not tell Dasein in advance what ought to be done. I submit that Arendt’s in-sight into a ‘right to have rights’, is an example of the kind of disclosure Heidegger articulates in his discussion of the relation between phronesis and sophia in his lectures on Plato’s Sophist. Recall Arendt’s argument in The Origins of Totalitarianism: ‘We became aware of the existence of a right to have rights . . . the right to belong to some kind of organized community, only when millions of people emerged who had lost and could not regain these rights because of the new global political situation’.11 Arendt’s claim of a universal right to politics is gained in a moment of in-sight wherein the open historical horizon of the whole is disclosed through the concrete experience of millions of refugees for whom no rights exist. And yet the disjunction between the horizon of the whole and the concrete experience is not erased. The universal horizon of this right remains indeterminate and open, thereby underscoring Heidegger’s suggestion that the irreducible gap existing between the ontological whole and concrete political life is the gap of practical judgment (phronesis). HEIDEGGER’S GELASSENHEIT: BOUNDARIES AS THE ENABLING POWER OF JOINTURE With the problematic and yet inseparable relation between the ontological and political life as background, I now want to turn to Heidegger’s notion of Gelassenheit, arguing its centrality in his rethinking the notion of belonging as ‘jointure’ (Fug). The usual translation of Gelassenheit as ‘non-willing’ or the ‘will-not-to-will’ misses the radical spatial sense of Heidegger’s use of the term. Perhaps more precisely, it misses the inseparable connection between non-willing and the letting-be of a space of appearance. Indeed, Heidegger’s essay titled ‘Gelassenheit’ is a long reflection on Gelassenheit as Gegnet, that is, a region that ‘abides into the expanse of resting’.12 As Heidegger writes, ‘That-which-regions is an abiding expanse which, gathering all, opens itself, so that in it openness is halted and held, letting everything merge in its own resting’.13 Gelassenheit, as that which both gathers together and at the same time lets beings be in their singularity, is the originary emergence of a space of appearance. Thinking the original regioning of Being, Heidegger is thinking the original power that allows for the letting-be of the space of appearance. In his Letter on Humanism, Heidegger names this original power the ‘enabling power



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of being’. He states: ‘To enable something here means to preserve it in its element, to maintain it in its element’.14 I quote him at length: Man is, and is man, insofar as he is the ek-sisting one. He stands out into the openness of Being itself, which as the throw has projected the essence of man into ‘care’ is as the openness. Thrown in such fashion, man stands ‘in’ the openness of Being . . . Man in his essence is ek-sisting into the openness of Being, into the open region that lights the ‘between’ within such a ‘relation’ of subject to object can ‘be’.15

Significantly, Heidegger begins his ‘Letter on Humanism’ not with a consideration of humanism but of action. He states, ‘We are still far from pondering the essence of action decisively enough’.16 At the outset of the letter he is concerned with challenging a notion of action rooted in the activity of will. In other words, while he does not deny that in some way activity defines the self, he argues that the activity definitive of the self cannot be understood in terms of a productive (Herstellen) willing, one rooted in relations of cause and effect. Instead he argues that action must be understood as accomplishment: ‘To accomplish means to unfold something into the fullness of its essence, to lead it forth into this fullness – producere’.17 To lead something into the fullness of its being is then the original meaning of production as accomplished. Still further, to ask about the essence of action is not to ask first about human activity, but instead of the activity of being which accomplishes this activity. Heidegger therefore rejects Sartre’s understanding of ‘humanism’ rooted in his claim, ‘Précisément nous sommes sur un plan où il y a seulement des hommes’ (‘Strictly speaking, there are only human beings who are defined by their projects’). Heidegger responds: Thought from Being and Time, this should say instead: précisément nous sommes sur un plan où il y a principlement l’Être [We are precisely in a situation where principally there is being]. But where does le plan come from and what is it? L’être et le plan are the same. In Being and Time (p. 212) we purposely and cautiously say, il y a l’Être: ‘there is/it gives’ (‘es gibt’) being . . . the ‘it’ that here ‘gives’ is being itself. The ‘gives’ names the essence of being that is giving, granting its truth. The self-giving into the open, along with the open region itself, is being itself.18

Human beings are not defined by their plans and projects, but instead, they belong to the original activity of the letting-be (Gelassenheit) of being. Heidegger claims that grasping the original power of being requires a step back from representational thinking. Representational thinking is always

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framed in the means-end relation and is understood exclusively as a human activity. Heidegger suggests here Sartre’s understanding of action never manages to go beyond action as Herstellen, that is instrumental activity that arranges, adjusts and produces. As Heidegger notes in his essay, ‘What are the Poets For?’ action as Herstellen is, ‘the pro-positing (positioning) that belongs to representation . . . Man places before himself the world as the whole of everything objective and he places himself before the world. Man sets up the world toward himself and delivers nature over to himself’.19 Human beings produce, transpose, and expose the world according to their own commands. The world is brought to a stand and placed in position by a representational thinking whose activity is that of the subjective will. Heidegger argues that only with the step back from representational thinking are to think the enabling power of being, which he names the ‘quiet power of the possible’. He writes: ‘When I speak of the ‘quiet power of the possible’ . . . I mean being which in its favoring presides over thinking and hence over the essence of humanity, and that means over its relation to being. To enable something here means to preserve it in its essence, to maintain it in its element’.20 This ‘quiet power of the possible’ is in contrast to the modern understanding of will to power which Heidegger claims understands being as the ‘absolute actuality’ of an ‘unconditioned will that wills itself’. This modern understanding of a subjective will to power conceals a proper understanding of will to power as enabling or letting something be (Gelassenheit) in its appearance. Here Heidegger is rejecting a notion of power linked to a wilful activity. More precisely, he is rethinking will to power as Entschlossenheit, the ‘resolute’ activity of letting-be (Gelassenheit): To will is to be resolved. [The essence of willing is here carried back to determination (Ent-schlossenheit, unclosedness). But the essence of resolve lies in this opening; the coming-out-of-cover (Ent-borgenheit) of human being-there into the clearing of being, and not in the storing up of energy for ‘action’ . . . its relation to being is one of letting be (Gelassenheit). The idea that all willing should be ground in letting-be offends the understanding].21

Offensive to the traditional understanding of power is Heidegger’s claim that willing must not be understood as the wilful assertion of a sovereign subject, but instead, as the activity of standing in the openness of being in a relation of care or letting-be. Heidegger’s ‘The Anaximander Fragment’ is one of the key texts for understanding his notion of power as ‘Gelassenheit’. As mentioned earlier, Arendt’s commentary on this text is her last fully finished essay before her death in 1975, a commentary that concludes the second volume of the Life of the



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Mind: Willing. Here Arendt continues her interest first sparked in Heidegger’s lectures on Plato’s Sophist, namely, that willing be rethought as the letting-be of appearance. In Heidegger’s reading of the Anaximander fragment, he goes further, thinking ‘letting-be’ as ‘letting-belong’ (Fug). Still further, in this essay Heidegger thinks ‘letting-belong’ as the ‘jointure of appearance’. This last, I submit, rejects an understanding of belonging constituted through identity and instead embraces the fundamental relatedness or jointure of beings in their diversity and plurality of appearing. Taking issue with Nietzsche’s translation of the fragment, which he claims is eschatological and tied to a conception of being as destiny, Heidegger offers a translation that emphasizes the temporal play of necessity and transience at the heart of being: ‘But that from which things arise also give rise to their passing away, according to what is necessary; for things render justice and pay penalty to one another for their injustice, according to the ordinance of time’.22 Significantly, Heidegger compares this earliest of Greek fragments to a later fragment in Western thinking, namely Nietzsche’s ‘To stamp Becoming with the character of Being – that is the highest will to power’. He notes that while the two fragments are concerned with power, Nietzsche’s fragment fails to think power as ‘original accomplishment’. Still further, the Anaximander fragment speaks of a lingering of appearances between two absences. This lingering Heidegger calls ‘transiency’, warning that the transiency of beings must not be set off against the permanence of being. Instead, paradoxically, the necessity of being must be thought as the transient, historical contingency of being. If we think of being as permanence, Heidegger argues that we are once again thinking being as the ‘absolute actuality’ of the unconditioned will: Being as will to power. In other words, this enabling arche is itself temporal and therefore is not left behind as a kind of ground or foundation of appearance. As William McNeill points out in his reading of Heidegger’s essay on the Anaximander fragment, the power of being is itself temporal, remains present in everything, and shows itself in appearance and disappearance.23 Going further, Heidegger argues that the giving of being (das Sein), ‘is not only giving-away; originally giving has the sense of acceding or giving-to. Such giving lets something belong to one another’.24 Heidegger names this ‘belonging’ the ‘jointure’ (dikē) of being.25 In other words, the common world has as its condition the giving of being that holds things together and allows being to belong together. Dikē is the law of belonging; dikē enjoins order and respect, demanding that beings linger, but not persist, in their appearance: This persistence is another name for the unconditional will to power. Heidegger names necessity ‘Brauch’ or need, pointing out that the German Bruch comes from the Latin frui, meaning to brook or ‘to hand something

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over to its own essence and keep it in hand, preserving it as something present’.26 Brauch as need does not signify scarcity or something lacking, but instead, abundance; it the overflowing of abundance (frui) that needs to give. And in giving Brauch gives and preserves the uniqueness of each particular being. In other words, Brauch lets each being be, while holding it in the protective heed of being. Brauch gives the measure of uniqueness to each particular being. In his essay, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ Heidegger uses the word ‘Bauen’ to name the dwelling and preserving power of the accomplishing power of being: ‘To dwell, to be set at place . . . within the free, the preserve . . . the fundamental character of dwelling is this sparing and preserving. It pervades dwelling in its whole range’.27 Original dwelling lets be (Gelassenheit) and preserves all that dwells in the sphere of the original dwelling. Heidegger describes this ‘original dwelling’ as a region in which ‘something has been made room for, something has been freed and cleared’.28 This radically changes the notion of a boundary or border. Rather than a border as something that limits or encloses, Heidegger claims that ‘[a] boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presenting. That is why the concept is that of horismosy that is, the horizon, the boundary. Space is in essence that for which room has been made, that which is let into its bounds’.29 The region of presencing or appearing is boundless and open, but at the same time gives limits or boundary. This giving of a boundary is paradoxically a ‘letting in’ or a ‘making room for’ rather than one that excludes or bans. Heidegger names this ‘belonging’ together the ‘jointure’ (dikē) of being. In other words, the common world has at its condition the giving of being that holds things together and allows being to belong together. Dikē is the law of belonging understood as jointure; it is that which ‘compels adaptation and compliance’. Dikē enjoins order and respect, demanding that beings linger, but not persist, in their appearance. This persistence is another name for the unconditional will to power. To better understand how beings could commit injustice or disorder, we need to further understand that for Heidegger the enabling power of being accounts for the uniqueness of the self. Against the persistence of will to power, Heidegger thinks Gelassenheit as the enabling power of being that allows for both the uniqueness of each being while preserving it in a protective hold of a space or regioning of beingin-common. Thus, in giving, dikē both gives and preserves the singularity or uniqueness of each individual being in its being-with others. Yet, the self, always conditioned and thrown into the overpowering order of dikē without any hope of autonomy, is absolutely accountable for that which happens in the worldly expanse of appearance. Human beings must respect this order: ‘If what is present grants order, it happens in this manner: as beings linger



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awhile they give reck [respect] to one another. The surmounting of disorder properly occurs through the letting-belong of reck [respect]’.30 In respect for the lawful order of belonging-together, the self is given as a responsible and accountable self. Recalling that the original power of being is without cause and is therefore the fundamental event of freedom, we can see that Heidegger is offering a radical critique of Kant’s ethical subject. For Kant, freedom and responsibility are located in the autonomous subject who is both legislator and subject in a sovereign community of ends. Rather than the Kantian transcendental law that addresses the sovereign subject, Heidegger gives us ‘the law of the possible’ a thoroughly immanent law of letting-be that addresses a thrown and exposed self who finds itself belonging to and in a common world with others. This law, Heidegger claims, cannot be violated by a sovereign will to power that seeks to actualize possibility by imposing ultimate meanings or determinations upon it. In summary, Heidegger thinks ‘belonging’ from this region of appearing to which something ‘is let into its bounds’. I suggest that the language of ‘belonging’ must be abandoned in favour of the language of jointure. The former remains haunted by a relation of inclusive and exclusive, a relation animated by a notion of power as rooted in the homogeneous, sovereign will of the people. Belonging has the connotation of stasis that ‘aims at everlasting continuance’,31 of maintaining an enduring order and control. Again, Heidegger calls this the will to power, a ‘craving to persist’,32 of solidifying and closing down of boundaries and borders. Jointure, on the other hand, carries with it the connotation of alliance, of the joining together of political actors in solidarity, of boundaries that are porous and open on all sides. At the heart of jointure is the notion of order (dikē) as contingent, dynamic, and transient. Belonging-together of jointure is abiding within an open expanse in which a plurality of anterior, but not autonomous beings, appear with one another in an ontological relationality of reck, which lets ‘something to be itself. Jointure ‘lets order belong’, which ‘no longer shares the compulsion to expel one another from what is presently present’.33 This originary belongingness constitutes what can be called ‘rightful appearance’ as such. In other words, an ‘originary belonging’ to worldly appearance as such provides the ontological foundation for a universal right to belong to a political space. TOWARDS A UNIVERSAL HUMAN CONDITION? While Arendt never mentions Heidegger in The Human Condition, nevertheless she reveals her debt to him at the very beginning of her analysis of the vita activa by making a distinction between two senses of ‘publicity’.

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Publicity, she argues, means first of all worldly appearance as such: ‘For us, appearance – something that is seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves – constitutes reality’.34 The other sense of publicity, she argues, denotes a common world: ‘Second, the term ‘public’ signifies the world itself, insofar as it is common to all of us and distinguished from our privately owned place in it. . . . It is related . . . to the human artifact, the fabrication of human hands, as well as to affairs which go on among those who inhabit the man-made world together’.35 Prior to and distinguished from the publicity of a ‘common world’, there is worldly appearing as such, although not yet a common, political appearance, the latter being for Arendt constituted through the common interests, the inter-esse, of a plurality of actors. Although Arendt suggests that the second sense of publicity, the common world of making and acting, has as its condition the first sense of publicity, she spends no time in The Human Condition analyzing this first sense. Only in her reading of Heidegger’s The Anaximander Fragment in The Life of the Mind, does she return to it, arguing that our activity in the common world with a plurality of others depends upon our belonging to the givenness of worldly appearance as such. Indeed, she makes explicit in her reading of Heidegger’s essay that the givenness of worldly appearance is precisely what allows for the unpredictability of action as our capacity for beginning something new. Thus, the basis of the ‘right to have rights’ emerges: the universal right to politics is rooted in the originary jointure of being ‘through one another’ and ‘being-in-common’. It is the universal right to appear and to belong to an organized political space. And because appearance is always historical, this universal right to politics is a ‘historical universal’, rooted in specific times and spaces with their violent exclusions and borders that violate this universal right. Again, while there is a universal right to politics, politics is never universal. The challenge of course is how to think the ontological appearance with the concrete historical exclusions that mark contemporary global politics? As I suggested above, this will require a new conception of citizenship, one rooted in a politics of the universal right to politics, to paraphrase Balibar’s essay referenced at the outset of this chapter. Indeed, Balibar, greatly indebted to both Heidegger and Arendt, gives us a way to think through this challenge when he argues that political actors always find themselves in a ‘practical confrontation with the different modalities of exclusion (social, and thus political, for the two notions have never truly been separate) that constitutes the founding moment of citizenship’.36 Rather than a notion of citizenship rooted in the stasis of the nation state, this new conception of citizenship – its founding moment – occurs in the interruption of the stasis of a political order and establishing politically the universal right to politics.



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This last marks the difference between the ethical subject and political actor. In short, the ethical subject acts in the face of an unconditional ethical obligation that must be obeyed: ‘thou shalt’. To avoid being unethical, I must obey the universal ethical imperative. Thus, the ethical realm is a realm of subjects obligated to the unconditioned and universal imperative. To be sure the unconditional ethical demand is never found apart from conditioned ethical acts. As Derrida notes, the unconditional demand of hospitality is never found apart from actual conditions of hospitality.37 The relation between the unconditional and the conditioned is that of a double ‘yes’: ‘yes’ to the unconditional demand, ‘yes’ to the conditions that obligate the ethical subject. The temporality at work in the ‘double yes’ is homogeneous.38 There is no interruption between the first and second ‘yes’. The second ‘yes’ confirms the first. By contrast, the political actor must say ‘yes’ and ‘no’. In other words, the political actor must say ‘yes’ to the universal right to politics and at the same time must say ‘no’ to the historical conditions that prevent establishing the universal right. The temporality at work in the relation between the ‘no’ and the ‘yes’ is the time of the Augenblick, the time of interruption and resistance. The universal right to politics requires acts of resistance by political actors who are responsible for the interruption of history in order to establish politically this universal right. Still further, the founding moment of global citizenship – Balibar’s conception of citizenship without community – occurs at these ‘worksites of universality’. These are historical sites wherein the political activity of ‘no’ establishes the ‘yes’, that is the universal principle through political action. Following Heidegger’s thought, but perhaps going beyond it, the task is to think and act from these historical sites of universality, interrupting and opening up borders in all their various sovereign guises, making room for those who have appeared. NOTES 1 Étienne Balibar, ‘What Is a Politics of the Rights of Man?’, in Masses, Classes, Ideas, trans. James Swenson (New York: Routledge, 1994), 208. 2 The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Global Trends 2015, last modified 15 March 2016, http://www.unhcr.org/576408cd7. 3 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1951), 296. 4 Ibid., 296–97. 5 Ibid., 295–96. 6 Augustine, The Confessions, trans. John Ryan (New York: Image Books, 1960), 196.

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7 For an extensive analysis of the border as a site of inclusion and exclusion, see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); and Agamben, Means without End, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 8 Hannah Arendt, ‘Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World’, in Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 81. 9 Ursula Ludz, ed., Letters: 1925–1975, Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, trans. Andrew Shields (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2004), 124, translation modified. The letter quoted is dated 28 October 1960. 10 Martin Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 112–13. 11 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 296–97. 12 Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 66. 13 Ibid. 14 Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi, in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1993), 220. 15 Ibid., 252. 16 Ibid., 217. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 237–38. 19 Martin Heidegger, ‘What Are Poets For?’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 2001), 107. 20 Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, 220. 21 Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 21. 22 Martin Heidegger, ‘Der Spruch des Anaximander’, in Holzwege (GA5), ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977), 322; English translation, ‘The Anaximander Fragment’, in Early Greek Thinking, trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 20 (hereafter cited as GA 5, I give the page references for both, with the German first and the English second, separated by an oblique [/]). 23 William McNeil, review of The Beginning of Western Philosophy: Interpretation of Anaximander and Parmenides, by Martin Heidegger, Notre Dame Philosophy Review, 4 October 2015, http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/61489-he-beginning-of-westernphilosophy-interpretation-of-anaximander-and-parmenides/. 24 Heidegger, GA 5, 329/43. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 339/53. 27 Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, 147, emphasis in original. 28 Ibid., 152. 29 Ibid. 30 Heidegger, GA5, 335/47.



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31 Ibid., 331/45. 32 Ibid., 331/45. 33 Ibid., 334/47. 34 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 50. 35 Ibid., 52. 36 Étienne Balibar, ‘Citizenship without Community’, in We, The People of Europe?, trans. James Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 76–77. 37 Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 147. 38 I am indebted to the Philosophy Department of Saint Xavier University, particularly to Professor Thomas Thorp, who invited me to give the John J. Ziegler Memorial Lecture in February 2016. Afterward Professor Thorp sent me an email with his notes from my lecture in which he raised the distinction between the ethical and the political, a distinction rooted in part in thinking through the different temporalities at work in each of these dimensions.

Chapter 12

The Quest for Global Ethics after the Decolonial Challenge Potentialities of Heidegger’s Thought Louiza Odysseos THE CALL TO GLOBAL ETHICS Calls for global justice and for the articulation of a genuinely global ethics punctuate a desire to reshape and give meaning to ‘the global age’ in which we find ourselves.1 Such calls abound, albeit often expressed in radically diverse registers, in wide-ranging discussions about globalization and socioeconomic inequality, climate change and environmental degradation, political militancy, etc. Many of these calls emerge from within plural sites in the Academia, including the liberal tradition of political and moral thought, as well as from within the varied traditions of philosophy, critical theory, critical political economy and environmental politics, and post-colonial and/or decolonial studies,2 while others arise within historical and ongoing struggles for humanity, meaningful presence, justice and equality. The diverse meanings given to ‘global ethics’ in these mounting calls need not detract from the urgent need for a response, itself never a singular or unilinear endeavour. In the context of this chapter, then, ‘global ethics’ is a formally indicative term whose contours and objectives should invoke greater critical interrogation, beyond ‘justice talk’.3 In other words, ‘global’ should not be understood as equivalent to ‘universal’, as I discuss at greater length below. Placing ‘global ethics’ under examination in political thought and moral philosophy is indeed particularly pertinent and topical at a time when decolonial critiques have rendered visible the blindness to colonialism and race and to the ways in which these articulate with contemporary forms of disposability.4 The chapter’s point of departure, then, is that varied attempts to develop a global ethics need to heed the decolonial concerns arising from within multiple – sociological, political-economic and ethico-political – disciplinary sites and set themselves the much-needed task of acknowledging and working 269

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through the multifarious manifestations of disposability and abandonment of the other in the global age, rendered visible by the devastating critique wrought by decolonial perspectives. This is but a first step however: articulating a global decolonial ethics needs to simultaneously engage decolonial articulations of new ways of thinking and being ethical and political, what Sylvia Wynter calls in summary form the struggle for the ‘hybridly human’.5 Here I am particularly interested in decolonial attempts to resist the ‘ongoing reproduction of a western European concept of humanity’ which reduces the world’s many cosmogonies to a ‘specific kind of human’.6 This figure, whom Sylvia Wynter simply calls ‘Man’,7 is incessantly established as the world’s ‘referent-we’,8 ‘whom we mean when we say ‘human’’,9 and is the pre-eminent subjectivity at the centre of diverse constructions of ethics. Failing to question the ‘epistemic privilege’ of this subject also serves to naturalize it as the archetypal subject of moral enquiry and to reinforce our silence as to its epistemic and other forms of injustice in the global era.10 I suggest here that thinking ‘with’, and often against, Martin Heidegger may aid attempts to articulate a global ethics in ways which acknowledge, and are coherent with, the decolonial challenge to knowledge, history and ‘the colonial present’.11 This may sound surprising to those rightly cautious about the apparent Eurocentrism found on the surface of the Heideggerian text – Heidegger after all could be quoted as noting the emergence of a ‘kind of knowledge . . . expressly developed as soon as a science corresponding to it unfolds and presents itself. This occurred and occurred only once in the course of the history of humankind within the history of the European west in its beginning, or better said, as the beginning of that epoch that we call modernity’.12 Yet for Heidegger this marks a devastating forgetting of being – concomitant with a fundamental ‘crisis of knowing’ and of representation. In Basic Concepts Heidegger wrote about the ‘deification’ of reason in modernity and the privileging of amassing scientific information about ‘man’, with the sciences and social sciences making ‘only organized use of what has been decided’.13 Clearer still is his evident rejection of easy and over-consumed answers to the questions of ‘where’ and ‘who’ we are: What if we did not know where we are and who we are? What if all previous answers to questions of who we are were merely based upon the repeated application of an answer given long ago, an answer that does not at all correspond to what is perhaps asked in the question, now touched upon, of who we are? For we do not now ask about ourselves ‘as human’, assuming we understand this name in its traditional meaning. According to this meaning, man is a kind of ‘organism’ (animal, ζῷον) that exists among others on the inhabited earth and in the universe. We know this organism, especially since we ourselves are of



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this type. There is a whole contingent of ‘sciences’ that give information about this organism – named man – and we collect them together under the name ‘anthropology’.14

This passage, in fact, is one that Wynter frequently mobilizes as a guide quote to punctuate her own unrelenting questioning of ‘Man’, aligning her thinking with both its urgency and its refusal to remain content with the answers to questions of the naturalness of knowledge about human beings offered by the natural and social sciences.15 I draw two conclusions from this initial confluence of concerns between Wynter and Heidegger: first, that the terrain of ethical subjectivity is far from settled and hence cannot function as a stable ground or foundation for global ethical theorizing; rather, it needs to be placed under interrogation, indeed, under erasure. And, second, that Heidegger’s thought may not be an a priori inhospitable terrain to such questioning of modernity and of ‘who we are’, despite other salient concerns emerging from the so-called Black Notebooks, discussed in this volume by Laurence Hemming. I propose that the work of Heidegger, approached critically and with the decolonial challenge in mind, outlined in the first section below, offers us resources to continue the interrogation of the formally indicated ‘global ethics’. Heidegger’s thought, identified in three key moments below, can also actively engage in the decolonial challenge, just as the decolonial critique can reveal significant lacunae and silences in the Heideggerian corpus, which need to be acknowledged. I discuss the first moment in summary form within his often invoked discussion of modernity and man’s simultaneous mastery of the world and nature as well as disposability of self and others as expendable resource in the thinking of Gestell and Bestand.16 I examine the second moment in Heidegger’s evocative discussion of ‘learning renunciation’ with which to engage the ‘technological’ language or ‘word’ of global modernity17; and, finally, I recall the third moment in the incessant unworking of modern subjectivity in his earlier work on human existence’s facticity the 1910s–1920s, which coheres and may participate uniquely in Wynter’s struggle for the ‘hybridly human’, by posing anew the questioning of the now dominant existing answers and ways of knowing ‘who we are’.18 The interrogation of a hermeneutics of facticity may lay the first stepping-stone for revealing the question of disposability as the pre-eminent question of global ethics itself. Following this exploratory discussion in section two, the conclusion initiates the difficult task of reflecting what the decolonial challenge means for Heideggerian thought and its impact on our understanding of the ‘global age’ itself. Returning to the interrogation of global ethics, the final section acknowledges that this compound term must be understood as shorthand for

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the ongoing quest for a global decolonial ethics – a praxis of being human that sets itself the task of intervening in the reconstitution of a global age as a new human order in which ‘all the old excluded orders must be included. The female, the proletariat, the foreign; the animal and vegetative; the unconscious and the unknown; the criminal and failure-all that has been outcast and vagabond must return to be admitted in the creation of what we consider we are’.19 THE DECOLONIAL CHALLENGE: RACE, MODERNITY AND THE COLONIALITY OF BEING Decolonial thought has long emerged in the fields of literary criticism, history, sociology and global political economy and has had unquestionable repercussions on ahistorical modes of thinking and analysis. Its reverberations today question certainties of ideal subjects and objects of knowledge, and the very endeavour of historiography. Importantly, its continuing development of the notion of ‘coloniality’ asks that we do not comfortably consign ‘colonialism’ to the historical misadventures of empires long deceased nor to those of our ancestors that did not know better. The notion of ‘coloniality’, which is attentive to the racialized and colonial conditions of possibility of contemporary disposability, has developed extensively from the world system inflection given to it some years ago by sociologist Aníbal Quijano. Quijano offered an analysis of the colonial model of power that rested on ‘the social classification of the world’s population around the idea of race’; for him, race was a ‘mental’ construction or category that worked to ‘codify the relations between conquered and conquering populations’.20 As such, race not only structured ‘the basic experience of colonial domination’, it also continued to permeate ‘the more important dimensions of global power, including its specific rationality: Eurocentrism’.21 There was a racial axis of colonialism, Quijano suggested, that evidenced great longevity and evolution. Colonialism’s racial axis ‘has proven to be more durable and stable than the colonialism in whose matrix it was established. Therefore, the model of power that is globally hegemonic today presupposes an element of coloniality’.22 The idea of race in colonial domination had concrete sociological repercussions, engendering new ‘forms of labor control’, which ranged from ‘slavery, serfdom, petty-commodity production, reciprocity, and wages’ and whose emergence enabled the production of ‘commodities for the world market’. Quijano emphasized the ways in which race and forms of labour control ‘remained structurally linked and mutually reinforcing’ and articulated a systematic ‘racial division of labor’.23 Therefore, he called attention to the



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historical and contemporary ‘coloniality of power’ – the afterlife, if you like, of colonial models of power – that ‘is tied up to the concentration in Europe of capital, wages, the market of capital, and finally, the society and culture associated with those determinations’.24 Quijano’s analytical introduction of ‘coloniality’ as a counterpart of modernity offered ways in which to later explore how claims of European cultural, and ethical, superiority were a naturalized aspect of the coloniality of power.25 Later thinkers like Walter Mignolo, Nelson Maldonado-Torres and Sylvia Wynter have continued to expand our understandings of contemporary forms of coloniality and its links to the ‘hidden agenda’ of modernity as an epoché and a set of socio-political and economic practices reliant on colonialism.26 They have also examined further modernity’s active forgetting of its inextricable relation to colonialism through the production of knowledge and its establishment of a Eurocentric order of knowledge.27 Wynter offers us a composite term, that of the ‘Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom’, which highlights the unacknowledged operations of coloniality as the afterlife of historical colonialism in varied fields of contemporary life that we normally do not associate with its violent relations of appropriation, as MaldonadoTorres’s explains: Coloniality, instead, refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations. Thus, coloniality survives colonialism. It is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience. In a way, as modern subjects we breath[e] coloniality all the time and everyday.28

For Maldonado-Torres an important aspect of coloniality is violence, war and genocide, because coloniality entails a radicalization and naturalization of the ‘non-ethics of war’, his shorthand phrase intended to capture the very modern ethos behind the colonial and systematic dispossession of lands and enslaving violence done to racialized others.29 Yet, for the quest for global ethics, the most severe and unrelenting critique of the cultural, poetic and ethico-political foundations of ‘Europe’ as a placeholder for modernity – comes from the thought of Wynter. A philosopher, playwright, actress and social critic of contemporary colonial modernity, she has offered a systematic and transdisciplinary deconstruction of what Mignolo calls the ‘Western code’,30 which naturalizes one historical and ethical figuration or genre of the human as Man and denies the multiplicity of humanity. More perniciously, ‘the rhetoric of modernity’ as European

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superiority,31 in failing to acknowledge and take responsibility for its violent colonial and expropriative32 conditions of possibility in colonial practices of conquest, genocide and organization of power, finds all other human figures lacking except its overrepresented [‘repeated’, Heidegger would say] form, which has become our predominant descriptive statement or ‘referent-we’. Since the secularizing humanism of the Renaissance, the ‘ordering principle of the discourse . . . [entailed] the figuration of an ontological order of value between groups who were markers of ‘rationality’ and those who were markers of its Lack-state’.33 For Wynter, ‘one cannot “unsettle” the “coloniality of power” without a redescription of the human outside the terms of our present descriptive statement of the human, Man, and its over-representation’:34 the process by which European man has presented himself ‘as if it were the human itself’.35 In other words, alongside the material and territorial relations of appropriation of colonialism, a mytho-poetic appropriation has been at work, manifesting itself in codes ensuring ‘the incorporation of all forms of human being into a single homogenized descriptive statement that is based on the figure of the West’s liberal monohumanist Man’.36 This emphasis on the overrepresentation of one figure as the human – the ‘repeated application of an answer given long ago’37 about white European man as a rational and masterful being – is accompanied by the denigrating generation of mythoi about those others deemed in dichotomous ways as the markers of its ‘lack-state’. Wynter, inspired by Frantz Fanon’s insight in Black Skin, White Masks that ‘beside phylogeny and ontogeny stands sociogeny’,38 develops an account of the ‘sociogenic code or principle’, which argues that any discussion of human social order must reconnect biological human beings (ontogeny) with the communally produced symbolic-material orders within which they have to exist and that envelop and sustain them (sociogeny). In other words, ‘scientific’ analyses and everyday social judgments on the achievements or failings of existing human – sexual, religious, racial, linguistic – communities must acknowledge that such utterances generate a reality in which such communities live. It is not only biological characteristics (‘survival of the fittest’ in Darwinian parlance) but the mythoi, words, and narratives that have been historically told about them and which continue to evolve today: these sociogenic parameters shape and structure their self-perceptions, understandings and encounters. To recall Fanon: ‘ “Dirty nigger!” Or simply, “Look, a Negro!” ’.39 The opening line of Fanon’s meditation on ‘sociogeny’, in the chapter entitled misleadingly ‘The fact of blackness’, renders visible that the ‘encounter’ as well as repeated and learned fearful and judgmental utterances about others – based on colour, sexuality, dress, faith and ‘scientific’ observations – all structure the social and narrative contexts in which human beings understand themselves. Human beings are not merely biological species – organisms – but also constituted collectively by the mythoi generated



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by others about them, by their exclusions from sociological analyses and ethical constructions: this is the cultural element of ‘coloniality’ which, based on ‘the idea of race’ (including the refutation of its operation as a structuring category), sustains the very ‘inferiority’, ‘backwardness’ and fear of the other.40 How does this impact on our endeavours to work towards the articulation of a global ethics?41 An initial set of observations might include that the socalled ethical encounter (that precedes even the most basic conception of ethics as obligatory moral action42) has had a far longer and pernicious history and contemporarily requires that we acknowledge its character of ‘coloniality’ as encounter.43 For the present chapter interested in questions of global ethics it is important to acknowledge that many of the constructions of ethical subjectivity rely implicitly on humanism’s (and later neoliberal44) descriptive statement. This is certainly the case for liberal theorizations of ethics, which are predicated on the rational and ostensibly equal moral agent; but many iterations of the subject of critical ethics, evident in Habermasian discourse ethics, for example, reverberates with the influence of Man too.45 I argue that working towards a global ethics in light of the decolonial challenge requires a prior destabilizing of ethics as ‘a medication not only on the human but also the really human’46; it requires that we move beyond the ethical subject’s assumed normativity, captured by what Wynter calls our ‘present descriptive statement’. In other words, our ‘present descriptive statement’ – redolent with what Mignolo calls ‘the rhetoric of modernity’47 – inflects our ‘present prescriptive statement’, or our ethics. A global decolonial ethics proceeds through a dissenting concrete and symbolic-deconstructive struggle to the sociogenic code. As Horne astutely observes, only this disposition enables questions about ‘relations between people’ to be asked in the first place, questions such as, ‘how does an empowered subject stand with an exploited and oppressed object? And after that chasm is bridged how would these objects emerge into being human fresh from what Fanon called the “zone-of non-being”?’.48 For Maldonado-Torres this requires ‘a radical dialogical ethics – to initiate a dialogue between humans and those considered subhumans’.49 For Ranjana Khanna, it entails a ‘focus on dissonance, contradiction, antinomy, and other manifestations of critical agency as they play out in temporal and spatial terms’.50 For Katherine McKittrick it requires new attempts to ‘foster adjoined human needs’, where ‘humanness might be newly conceptualized as a relational category . . . a bios-mythois, that is differentially inscribed by a knowledge system . . . outside the laws of captivity’ of contemporary coloniality.51 In the following section I explore three key moments – neither linear nor seamlessly coherent – of Heideggerian thinking which, taken together, illuminate how a critical engagement with Heidegger may allow us to adjoin

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his thinking to the project of a future global decolonial ethics. In the first moment, I touch on Heidegger’s openness to the modern global era as an era of mastery, evidenced in its predominant forms of world-disclosure that are characterized by ‘setting upon’ and ‘requisitioning’ nature, selves and others; this openness is, at the same time, accompanied by a blindness to the differential manifestations of ‘setting upon’ – in the schema of colonialism and expropriation – in the modern global era. In the second moment I suggest that Heidegger’s discussion of renunciation of the ‘language’ of modernity in essays such as ‘Words’ and ‘The Nature of Language’52 moves us closer to destabilizing our ‘present prescriptive statement’ undersigned by its code/ language of coloniality. In this chapter, the language of modernity is, at the same time, the language of coloniality: that experiential structuring device that enables the ‘really human’ to encounter and comport with others through objectification/thingification and a racialized and classed setting-upon of exploitation. Its renunciation, which Heidegger suggests ‘must be learned’, may lead to renewed ethical reflection and subjectivity. Renunciation privileges ‘the need to place oneself before the world (vorweltlich), which meant to resist, and indeed abolish, reified and culturally institutionalized attitudes’, maintaining and recalling that ‘our relationship with the world is open to an active potentiality’.53 Renunciation, understood in this way, moves us closer I suggest, to the reconstitution of the term ‘human’ from noun to verb, from evaluative descriptor to ‘being human as praxis’.54 Finally, in the third moment, I revisit the earlier work of Heidegger, whose attempts to harness the hermeneutics of human facticity works together in unique ways with the attempt to both recover and reinstate as legitimate the ‘hybridly human’ from the hidden ‘racialized nature of western notions of the human’.55 HEIDEGGERIAN RESOURCES: MODERNITY, LANGUAGE AND FACTICITY Taken in its dominant ‘anthropological-instrumental’ conception, technology means ‘the practical application of modern science’ and more specifically refers to instruments, which are invented by humans, or the totality of such amassed instruments for human production, activity and communication.56 Heidegger’s dismissal of this superficial view suggested that there exists a ‘knowledge-character’57 to technology and provided his own critical interrogation of ‘enframing’ as its distinctive mode of disclosure (Gestell).58 Famously arguing that the essence of technology is by no means anything ‘technological’,59 Heidegger provides a devastating critique of the modes of knowing and world disclosure which technology entails in the global age.



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Looking beyond the immediate and attractive understandings of technology in teleological terms, he calls for an understanding of technology as a mode of disclosure and as a bringing forth – as revealing. If ‘every bringing-forth is grounded in revealing’, then technology is a kind of revealing permeated by instrumentality, that is a calculation of means and ends.60 Tracing the etymology of ‘technology’ to the Greek notion of technē, Heidegger refutes that the early Greek term vastly differs from our present development, use and associated understandings of global modern technology. Retaining the centrality of revealing, Heidegger goes on to suggest that the revealing that marks technology as modern entails a ‘challenging’ (Herausfordern) and a ‘setting-in-order’.61 Heidegger explicitly connects this kind of challenging to production and extraction: ‘what does ‘to position, place, set’ [stellen] mean? We know the word from the usages: to represent something, to produce something’.62 The kind of revealing that is linked to extraction, organization and appropriation of nature and human activity takes on the nature of ‘expediting’ both in the revealing of nature, things and beings and in the resulting unlocking of their innate energies and potentialities. Recalling here Michel Foucault’s understanding of modern government as ‘the right disposition of things’,63 the bringing forth which modern technology reveals, is inextricably tied up with organization, ‘stockpiling’, and securing of ‘everything’ for present and future use.64 It is the – sometimes implied and sometimes quite explicit – desirable mastery towards the world, nature, and beings, which is itself revealed through Heidegger’s discussion; this is the reduction and the making possible of appropriation of everything as ‘standing-reserve’ (Bestand) sometimes rendered as ‘extractable resource’65 or ‘human forces’.66 Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering. What ever is ordered about in this way has its own standing. We call it the standing-reserve (Bestand).67

For Heidegger there is a notably futile and self-perpetuating character to the setting-upon and ordering of what there is as standing-reserve. In the Bremen Lectures he makes this clear: Again we ask: where does the chain of such requisitioning finally run out to? It runs out to nothing; for requisitioning produces nothing that could have, would be allowed to have, a presence for itself outside of such positioning. What is ordered is always already and always only imposed upon to place another in the succession as its consequence.68

What is of significance for this mode of disclosure is the ‘application’ and the setting in place of future and planned consequences, which themselves define

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‘success’: ‘Success is that type of consequence that itself remains assigned to the yielding of further consequences’.69 Man – the descriptive statement of the particular overrepresented genre of human being that we may also call white European man – has a particular role to play in this mode of revealing, which challenges, orders and eventually disposes (in the dual sense of the arranging things in the ‘right disposition’ for preplanned ends and ‘getting rid of’) of himself, other men, things, lands and nature itself. ‘Only to the extent that man for his part is already challenged to exploit the energies of nature can this ordering revealing happen’.70 How can man be at the same time challenged and that being who brings to the fore the technological kind of revealing? ‘If man is challenged, ordered, to do this, then does not man himself belong even more originally than nature within the standing-reserve?’71 A term that would have been a neologism for Heidegger – ‘human resources’ – illuminates the duality of subjection and active participation of human beings, as both captive and masters of global modern technology seen as a mode of revealing: ‘when man, investigating, observing, ensnares nature as an area of his own conceiving, he has already been claimed by a way of revealing that challenges him to approach nature as an object of research, until even the object disappears into the objectlessness of standing-reserve’.72 What does it mean to be ‘claimed’, however, and what is the nature of such a claiming? In his translation of the Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, Andrew Mitchell conveys the meaning of Heidegger’s discussion through a potent and evocative term: conscription. Men and women must place themselves in a work service. They are ordered. They are met by a positioning that places them, i.e., commandeers them. . . . to place, position, set means here: to challenge forth, to demand, to compel toward self-positioning. This positioning occurs as a conscription [die Gestellung]. The demand for conscription is directed at the human. But within the whole of what presences, the human is not the only presence approached by conscription.73

‘[S]tand[ing] in place and at the ready’ in a constancy of awaiting use is what distinguishes ‘standing-reserve’: ‘The constant consists of continuous orderability within such a conscription’.74 Man is conscripted, then, in the sense of being gathered up into this challenging and ordering as one more resource to be arranged and employed awaiting to be used. The ‘challenging claim which gathers man thither to order the self-revealing as standing-reserve’, Heidegger calls ‘das Ge-stell’.75 How does Heidegger’s interpretation of technology cohere with the decolonial critique of modernity as inextricably linked with colonialism, which is understood as an encounter and a practice of mastery, appropriation and violence instituted in structures and institutions, local and global? What



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space is there to acknowledge those ‘conscripts of modernity’ – les damnés and intellectuals of decolonization alike – in the thinking of Gestell?76 On the one hand, the account that Heidegger provides reveals global technology as Gestell as the background ontological and historical epoché, in the dual sense of era and withdrawal of being, which makes possible colonial knowledge (revealing) and orderability (enslavement and violence). On the other hand, for Heidegger, to propose that requisitioning is exclusively a ‘machination of the human’ would be to only remain in ‘the horizon of everyday opinion’, which is a ‘mere illusion’.77 Whilst Heidegger acknowledges the violence of ‘requisitioning’, which ‘has wrested away all that presences and placed it into complete orderability . . . outstripping everything, drags the particular acts of requisitioning only further along behind itself’, he is adamant that we acknowledge at the same time that requisitioning ‘is no mere human doing, even if the human belongs to the carrying out of such a requisitioning’.78 In brief, Heidegger insists on the centrality of man’s – including white European man’s – own conscription in/to ‘Enframing’. Although it is not entirely faithful to Heidegger’s discussion, it may help to grasp this as an ambivalent simultaneity of mastering and being mastered. Standing within ‘such a conscription’ at the same time man has triumphantly taken to his role as master, unwittingly ‘offered himself for the carrying out of this conscripting. He stands in line to take over such requisitioning and to complete it. The human is thereby an employee of requisitioning. Humans are thus, individually and in masses, assigned into this’.79 Hence, in its revealing of the simultaneity of man as master and disposable resource within global modernity, Heidegger’s argument offers an important background discussion of the condition of possibility of colonial modernity. Yet, Heidegger’s insights into Gestell and Bestand also evidence a blindness to the historical manifestation of colonialism and, as a result, to the differentiated, that is racialized, allocation of disposability of colonized others. This is shown most clearly in Maldonado-Torres’s development of concept of the ‘coloniality of being’ who invokes Fanon’s ‘les damnés’, those ‘wretched of the earth’,80 whose conscription is directly imposed by colonial oppression and violence. The colonized are those subjects onto whom being ‘set-upon’ is writ large. Heidegger’s attentiveness to the simultaneity of mastering and being mastered cannot defuse the significance of his blindness to the differential positioning of colonizers and the colonized in conscription. MaldonadoTorres is unrelenting: What Heidegger forgot is that in modernity Being has a colonial side, and that this has far-reaching consequences. The colonial aspect of Being, that is, its tendency to submit everything to the light of understanding and signification, reaches an extreme pathological point in war and its naturalization through the

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idea of race in modernity. The colonial side of Being sustains the color-line. Heidegger, however, looses [sic] from view the particular predicament of subjects in the darker side of this line and the significance of their lived experience for theorization of Being and the pathologies of modernity. Ironically, Heidegger recognizes the existence of what he calls ‘primitive Dasein’, but in no way he connected it with colonized Dasein.81

Noting both this blindness and the need to foreground it, we might nevertheless insist on considering Heidegger’s reflection on possible (and of uncertain success) destabilization of the hold of the overarching positionality/enframing, in which Man is conscripted. This discussion – the second moment of intersection with the decolonial challenge – revolves around the recovery of a revealing and destabilizing experience with language, in which Heidegger proceeds to both critique pervasive modes of expression that participate in ‘expediting’ the challenging and ordering of nature, self and other and, also, to find a way out of this prominent but ‘impoverished’ mode of revealing, comportment and knowledge.82 What Heidegger regards to be a genuine experience of our world, in and through language, is one that might derail the challenging and setting upon ēthos (see Hatzisavvidou’s contribution in this volume) and might allow for other forms of disclosure. This would entail a necessarily unflinching awareness of the peculiar voluntariness of conscription and of the differential impact it has had historically, and continues to have today, for racialized, colonized and disposable Dasein. It coheres with, and offers a parallel and reinforcing avenue, I argue, to Wynter’s ongoing reflections towards a revitalization of Aimé Césaire’s late-1940s call for a new ‘science of the Word’.83 Renouncing the ‘Word’ of the Global Age: Technological Language and the Recovery of Words, Things and Beings How does one recover modes of world disclosure that allow that which presences – things and human alike – to appear without being set upon and expedited onto storage, preparedness and use? How is this general ‘mode of revealing’ as a challenging conscription itself illuminated in its historical manifestation of colonialism? How does the ‘idea of race’84 in the colonial and neocolonial global era enable a differentially ‘allocated’ and violent requisitioning of those deemed disposable and expendable? This is not only central to the task of finding a way towards global ethics which privileges the decolonial disposition but also pivotal to achieving a critical engagement with Heidegger’s thought. In the late 1940s Heidegger begun to concertedly envision that ‘[t]he first step to such vigilance is the step back from merely representational,



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i.e., explanatory thinking into commemorative thinking’.85 ‘Commemorative thinking’ might emerge as a possibility following a shift away from the predominant mode of relating to the world and ‘all that presences’. The possibility of a different engagement with language is tied to Heidegger’s understanding that it is ‘each historic language, and not a table of universal a priori concepts, that engages in world-disclosure’.86 The concern with the historically specific language of global modernity is that it participates in and, at the same time, occludes and depoliticizes the mode of revealing as a challenging setting-upon, discussed above. Heidegger calls this ‘technological language’.87 Heidegger’s discussion of traditional and technological language speaks to the systematic impoverishment of language, and by extension privileged forms of knowledge, in modernity, lamented too by Aimé Césaire in the late 1940s in his famous essay ‘Poetry and Knowledge’.88 He traces this gradual denigration of language and knowledge to the conception of language as the conveying of information, which is one aspect of his broader critique of the crisis of knowing, thinking and representation: With the unconditional reign of modern technology there is an increase in the power – the demand as well as the performance – of the technological language that was devised for the widest possible spread of information. Because this (power) is scattered in systems of formalized reports and signals, the technological language is the severest and most menacing attack on what is peculiar to language: saying as showing and as the letting appear of what is present and what is absent, of reality in the widest sense.89

The elevation of information in the global era into the most esteemed form of language, ‘because of its clarity, and the security and speeding the exchange of reports and assignments’90 affects not only modes of revealing but participates in the violence which such disclosure facilitates: the violence of representation, which itself sanctions material and cultural acts of disposing (and disposing of) and orderability. Heidegger is very clear regarding the impact of technological language on humans and their relations to others and things in the world: ‘the result of this is the corresponding conception of the human’s being and of human life’.91 This reduction of comportment to others and things to information exchange distorts not only everyday activities, such as producing, selling and learning, but also fundamental and manifold relations to others and things in the world: ‘[a]s long as the human being’s relationship to those beings that surround and carry it, as well as to the being which it itself is, rests on the letting-appear, on the spoken and unspoken saying, the attack of the technological language on what is peculiar to language is at the same time the threat to the human beings ownmost essence’.92

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And, as one must recall, this ‘ownmost essence’ is not a constant and tangible physicality, rationality or other mental faculty; rather, it is tied inextricably to sense-making and disclosure, enabling the letting appear of ‘meaningful presence’ or ‘intelligibility’93 – in which speech figures centrally. This, however, is not the immediate and superficial association of disclosing with the physical act of speaking or the actual sound of speech: Saying is in no way the linguistic expression added to the phenomena after they have appeared – rather, all radiant appearance and all fading away is grounded in the showing saying. Saying sets all present beings free into their given presence, and what is absent into their absence. Saying pervades and structures the openness of that clearing which every appearance must seek out and every disappearance must leave behind and in which every present or absent being must show, say, announce, itself.94

Heidegger is concerned to avoid the assumption of independence between things (including others in the world), on the one hand, and the word or saying, on the other, which may occur if we treat the word as a thing itself. Rather, the saying reveals by bestowing meaning and relational context: ‘Saying is showing. In everything that speaks to us, in everything that touches us by being spoken and spoken about, in everything that gives itself to us in speaking, or waits for us unspoken, but also in the speaking that we do ourselves, there prevails showing which causes to appear what is present’.95 Here Heidegger’s concerns with representational thinking – which itself is made possible by our disclosing potentiality and character – comes closest to the discussion of sociogeny in Fanon and Wynter. To recall, Fanon captures the central argument of his Black Skin, White Masks with the insight that ‘beside phylogeny and ontogeny stands sociogeny’: in other words, in addition to what there is, there is the word that captures, gives meaning and passes judgment about the thing that is. The thing that is can only be revealed in a world of pregiven sense and it is in this socio-cultural world of meaning – the sociogenic context – in which beings can appear. Beings, put otherwise, are only ever ‘discursively constituted beings’.96 The word we speak about each and every being is not itself a thing; it is more than even that which signifies something about the thing. ‘The word is what first brings that given thing, as the being that is, into this ‘is’; that the word is what holds the thing there and relates it and so to speak provides its maintenance with which to be a thing’.97 Absence and making things recede from view is also a kind of showing and giving meaning. There is no guarantee in our speaking that we attain genuine disclosure of things and beings that presence in the world. Such a stance that makes things recede relates back to Heidegger’s concern with representation



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more broadly, and more specifically with language as information. Information may well provide a multitude of data, of descriptions, of judgments and evaluations, indeed, the creation of worlds of meaning, yet may only work to ‘bring[s] what is absent into their absence’.98 How do we recover a different relation to language, one that seeks to resist or subvert participating in modes of revealing that ‘requisition’, set upon and challenge things and other beings in order to enlist them as ‘conscripts’ of standing-reserve? Heidegger’s meditation on Stefan George’s poem ‘The Word’ provides some guiding thoughts in this direction. In essays such as ‘The Nature of Language’ and ‘Words’ Heidegger contrasts the search for a different experience with language with that which is gained when ‘language is understood as an instrument of communication’: a more attentive and ‘commemorative’ kind of interaction with language may indeed become possible and arise within a situation of ‘breakdown’ and in particular the ‘transitional breakdown of the word’.99 George’s lyrical description of dreams, twilit morns, and treasures on country strands results in a surprising and apparent proclamation: So lernt ich traurig den verzicht: Kein ding sei wo das wort gebricht.100 So I renounced and sadly see: Where word breaks off no thing may be.101

Heidegger’s playful yet systematic interrogation of the possible meaning of ‘I renounced’ in George’s final stanza leads him to question what occurs in both the act of renunciation and the resulting ‘seeing’ (of) the lack or disappearance of the word: ‘where word breaks off no thing may be’. Heidegger discusses how this reveals that the ‘word not only stands in relation to the thing, but this ‘may be’ itself is what holds, relates and, keeps the thing as thing; that the ‘may be’, as such keeper, is the relation itself’.102 This can only mean that no thing ‘is’ ‘where the word is lacking. A thing is not until, and is only where, the word is not lacking that is there’.103 The poet’s renunciation is itself significant, however, as it might refer to what makes possible this seeing of the word as the very possibility of relation to/with the thing. And what is important is that ‘in order to experience this face-to-face of things with one another in this way, we must, of course, first rid ourselves of the calculative frame of mind’.104 Renouncing, Heidegger explains in the essay ‘Words’, ‘belongs to the verb to forgive’ and is also linked to ‘accusing’ and ‘charging’ indicated in the Greek ‘deiknumi’.105 Invoking both a straightforward ‘accusation’, it is also a saying, which ‘give[s] up the claim to something, to deny oneself something’.106 What

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kind of claim is being given up? In Heidegger’s, like Césaire’s, meditation what may be given up is the denigration and impoverishment of language in the modern global era as it centrally participates in controlling our relations to worldly things and beings as available for use through information exchange. Heidegger’s invocation of ‘control’ is suggestive: ‘The poet must renounce having words under his control as the portraying names for what is posited’.107 Renunciation of such control over language and revealing can only be a ‘genuine renunciation, not just a rejection of Saying’ when it aims at ‘a different tone’.108 This kind of renunciation ‘commits itself to the higher rule of the word which first lets a thing be as thing’.109 Relinquishing control of the technological language of the global age is an attempt, then, to instigate, and abide by, a commemorative approach, which strives to be attentive to a ‘higher rule’, whose ethos is that it ‘lets a thing be as a thing’. Renouncing a claim to the world and things as standing-reserve opens a way to their showing outside the orderability of Gestell. Renouncing denies the veracity and hold on us of ‘‘impoverished’ knowledge of rational judgment and scientific enumeration’ for a poetic ethos of letting appear.110 Heidegger’s discussion of renunciation connects in unanticipated ways with decolonial endeavours to reject the colonizing/ed language of the global era and seek a ‘new science of the Word’ that affords us new possibilities for revealing ‘an entire experience’, rather than technocratic classification, of beings.111 It is on this ‘showing’ that the way to global decolonial ethics is predicated. At this point in our discussion the question returns to the issue of ‘conscription’ and the possibility of interrogating how we embody modes of revealing, which obscure both our own conscription to and the ways in which we remain in the ‘service’ of the revealing orderability of standing-reserve? Put otherwise, renunciation of the language, knowledge and comportment of the modern ‘technological era’, must surely require a return to Heidegger’s own ‘unworking’ of assumptions and given certainties of modern philosophy and science about ‘Man’ or modern subjectivity. This third moment adjoins Heidegger’s early search for a ‘hermeneutics of facticity’ to one significant vein of the decolonial project, the search for the ‘hybridly human’, for multiple and entangled genres of the human to reorient ethical disposition and practice. This is discussed in the final subsection below. Man, Modern Subjectivity and Coexistential Heteronomy The renunciation of modes of world disclosure that set-upon and challenge things and beings in our world may benefit from a return to that best known of Heidegger’s preoccupations, that of a fundamental ontology that proceeds via



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the ‘destruction’ of modern subjectivity. An unwitting consequence, in terms of Heidegger’s ‘project’, the revoking of man as ‘I’ and the emergence of human existence as radically thrown and embedded into the other-determined world of sense and connection (assignment) may yet reveal a significant affinity with decolonial scholarship, which strives towards mapping and critically assessing the contours and implications of our age’s ‘descriptive statement’ – what Wynter calls ‘Man’ – whilst seeking to account and restore its rightful multiplicity to the ‘hybridly human’. Heidegger’s project of fundamental ontology has received such attention that it is difficult to approach anew. What concerns me here is the ways in which Heidegger’s attentiveness to human thrownness problematized and rendered unstable a host of presuppositions of a ‘sovereign’ (read: autonomous, rational, masterful) subject. Such assumptions, as Heidegger was to note at the outset of Being and Time paid little attention to the everydayness of human existence and what that view of coping and going about our dealings with others and things in our jointly inhabited world may uncover about our ‘facticity’.112 Heidegger’s ‘unworking’ of modern subjectivity, I have argued elsewhere, is indeed nothing less than a shift away from unquestioned subjectivist commitments, and towards an understanding of existence that allows the heteronomy of the self to show itself.113 Reading the painstaking redescription that Heidegger undertakes in Division I of Being and Time as a heterological reading of Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity illuminates the constitutive role of the other, and indeed otherness in general, in the emergence of a ‘self’. Such a process of constitution, however, is occluded by extra-phenomenal assumptions about autonomy, rationality and mastery in we might call an ‘effacement of heteronomy’.114 The ways in which others create ‘my’ world, the ways in which ‘I’ flee from anxiety and find comfort and sustenance in others, as well as the ways in which ‘I’ am other to myself, all these fundamental indications of the primacy of relation for the constitution of the self are obscured by philosophical presuppositions and scientific trends alike about ‘man’. This phenomenal concealing of otherness and relationality also makes possible the effacement of heteronomy in ethical, political and institutional contexts; indeed, it is one of the ethico-political conditions of the ‘idea of race’ and its operationalization in historical colonialism and contemporary disposability. Ultimately subverting such presuppositions, Heidegger’s existential analytic aimed to access the phenomena of existence in their average everydayness which, whilst bracketing such widely held assumptions, showed their power and operation in our self-perception and the structuring of our comportment to things and others (see, e.g., the discussion of ‘distantiality’ [Abständigkeit]115). Reading Heidegger’s Daseinanalytik as a heterology illustrates how otherness and others are in fact primary for the constitution

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of the self (Dasein, Being-there) as a being-in-the-world. As I have argued elsewhere, such a reading illuminates Dasein to be heteronomously constituted in the following ways. First, Dasein initially and primarily finds itself immersed in its dealings with the world. Insisting on ‘engaged immersion’ as the primary mode of Dasein challenges the assumption that reflection and ‘knowing’ are the definitive modes of human relationality towards other entities and the world.116 Second, Dasein’s disclosive character uncovers a conception of the world, not as spatial container, but rather as a background totality of meanings and references against which existence makes sense of itself in an entirely pre-reflective manner; this totality is also a totality of connected assignments and relations with available things and other beings. This totality of meanings and references is, importantly, not solely singularly or autonomously created by Dasein; rather, the practices, norms and rules that help Dasein cope with involvements in the world are created first by others and generally can be said to be structured by otherness: these already exist in advance of any individual human’s activities. Crucially, the understandings that Dasein has of ‘itself’, and of the world, are always already ontologically mediated through otherness. This is significant as it foretells the later concern Heidegger – and Césaire for that matter – would have with reductive, calculative and, in this sense, partial assumptions and knowledge of things, others and the world. Third, Dasein encounters world and others with ‘withness’ as an attribute of the kind of being that Dasein is. Dasein, Heidegger insists contra assumptions about the I-saying subject, is essentially Being-with. For Dasein, in other words, existence is already coexistence, Being-there is always Beingwith. Selfhood is fundamentally coexistential, but this is not to be understood in the sense of composition or co-presence assumed of the completed and autonomous subject of modernity.117 Withness, furthermore, manifests itself in such a way that in its everydayness Dasein cannot be distinguished from others: the answer to the question, ‘who is Dasein?’ is not the ‘I’, says Heidegger, but rather the ‘they’ [das Man].118 Heidegger’s existential analytic, many will rightly rush to clarify, focused on the self’s process of becoming authentic or proper – a process often (mis)understood as a solipsistic and deterministic disavowal of others and community, relationality and heteronomy. Here I urge that ‘authenticity’ be grasped as becoming the ‘improper’ properly,119 a groundless, mortal self, resolving to ‘living mortally now’120 and relating to the other in acknowledgment of its heteronomous constitution. Far from a restoration of the ‘I’, the propriety of human existence arises from unique appropriations of that existential ‘withness’ Heidegger accounts for in das Man as, for example, in modes of liberating solicitude [Fürsorge].121 Put otherwise, becoming proper pertains directly to the critical interrogation and shedding of presuppositions of modern subjectivity – indeed of rational



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and masterful ‘Man’ – in a range of narratives and mythoi in the sciences, the study of societies and their development. Fourth, Dasein is fundamentally attuned to the world and its understanding of itself and the surrounding world is affected by this attunement. Dasein’s attunement is evident in its disposition for moods (see the extensive discussion of this in Erik Ringmar’s chapter in this volume), from the structure of its understanding, and its use of language or discourse. Such attunement illuminates a radical embeddedness which is best described as being-thrown into the world, but at the same time, Dasein’s understanding of itself as ‘possibility’ indicates that it is the kind of being that also projects itself upon possibilities and towards the future. Dasein’s embeddedness has the structure of thrown projection: this means nothing other than the world and others matter to Dasein. In everydayness, the world matters to such an overwhelming extent that Dasein can be said to have ‘fallen prey’ to the world. Fallenness, thrownness, and projectiveness together suggest that, rather than self-presence and selfsufficiency, Dasein’s Being is better understood as care [Sorge].122 The heterological reading of existence gives pride of place to otherness rather than to a singular, autonomous and ‘cultural’ understanding of the subject, what Wynter calls modernity’s overrepresented descriptive statement. For, reading the three aforementioned moments in Heidegger’s thought together, it is this assumption about who we are, made in the language of modern technology which controls the words/mythoi about self and other in which we reiterate challenging forms of revealing, which erase the very question of who we are at the moment when its asking is a global concern and a quest for new modes of relating and comporting to others: What if all previous answers to questions of who we are were merely based upon the repeated application of an answer given long ago, an answer that does not at all correspond to what is perhaps asked in the question, now touched upon, of who we are?123

These pivotal analyses of existence as coexistential and heteronomous bring to the fore ‘the preontological normative force that others exert upon Dasein’, which suffused Heidegger’s work and revealed ‘the constitutive importance of preontological existence alongside others’.124This ‘prereflective normativity’ precedes, and stands distinct from, ‘rule thematization, explicit rule learning’, and any choice in terms of ‘rule following’.125 The three moments in Heidegger’s thought recounted here alongside the decolonial challenge move us away from universal ethical construction and understandings of ethics as ‘obligatory action’,126 and towards the recovery of an ethically comporting self. I argue that this offers a starting point and a possibility for a global ethics, which must be sought in each of the key moments outlined in brief above:

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in the critical engagement with modes of revealing that ‘set-upon’ and order; in the renunciation of technological language which renders an ‘impoverished humanity’; and lastly a reconceptualization of the coexistential and heteronomously constituted self, a form of selfhood amenable to non-masterful relations; a selfhood that is instantiated as ‘open to the other’. (ETHICAL) WAYS FORWARD: CONCLUDING REMARKS The Symposium of Plato was restricted to a community of Athenians, gathered in the common creation of an arete, an aristocracy of spirit, inspired by the homoEros, taking its stand against lower or foreign orders, not only of men but of nature itself. The intense yearning, the desire for something else, of which we too have only a dark and doubtful presentiment, remains, but our arete, our ideal of vital being, rises not in our identification in a hierarchy of higher forms but in our identification with the universe. To compose such a symposium of the whole, such a totality, all the old excluded orders must be included. The female, the proletariat, the foreign; the animal and vegetative; the unconscious and the unknown; the criminal and failure-all that has been outcast and vagabond must return to be admitted in the creation of what we consider we are.127

In his hospitable evocation of retrieving an openness to the ‘old excluded orders’, the poet Robert Duncan echoes the ethos that predicates the quest for critical articulations of global ethics that are attentive to otherness. Such an ethos calls for an openness not necessarily brought about through the mere bestowal of formal equality or legal entitlements, such as human rights upon the other,128 but prioritizes a questioning of formations of the world ‘community’ and its historical narratives and mythopoetic inclusions and exclusions. This is, at the same time, a questioning of ‘our’ own ethics; this can only take the form of an attempt towards the recovery of an ‘ethical’ selfhood ‘which knows itself as opening to alterity’129 and speaks of – not as sound but as showing – the cultivation of a disposition towards the other.130 In light of the above discussion, the potentialities identified in Heidegger’s thinking meet Sylvia Wynter’s urgent call for transforming the term ‘human’ from a noun to a verb: from ‘human being to being human as praxis’.131 Recasting the question of global ethics outside the grammar of modern coloniality may be aided, but not sufficiently, by the potentiality of Heideggerian thinking this chapter has argued. It requires the envisioning anew of inherited struggles and possibilities and abuts them to the multiple decolonizing struggles that demand not only liberation of the political, economic and environmental sort but, at the same time, targets ‘epistemic de-colonization’ of the ‘hidden complicity between the rhetoric of modernity and the logic of coloniality’.132



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In this space, the quest for global ethics is refracted through the dynamics of colonization and decolonization, making it inseparable from the political.133 This remains true to Heidegger’s own distancing of his thought from ‘ethics’134 whilst revisiting his critical interrogation of modernity’s technological modes of revealing and narrative capturing of things and beings, as discussed above. For ‘the grammar of de-colonization’135 is not only predicated on an ethical disposition attuned to coloniality and disposability but, in its critique of the setting-upon narrativizing of Bestand, also ‘has to do with the overcoming of the ‘zone of nonbeing’, with the dominant Western understanding of the human (as Man), and with the separation between Man and its sub-others’.136 Ethics then becomes part of ‘the effort to create a new form of valuation altogether’137 which underwrites a praxis of Being-human. Such a praxis begins with the ‘deliberate production of the language and a subjectivity that know and experience otherwise’.138 Rather than ‘dwell[ing] on the static empiricism of the unfittest and the downtrodden’, it is the ‘the realization of the living’,139 which for Wynter allows the ‘performative enactment of all such genres of being hybridly human’.140 For Wynter, as possibly for Heidegger, this amounts to thinking the need for ‘counterhumanism – one now ecumenically “made to the measure of the world” ’.141 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author would like to thank Gurminder Bhambra, Antonio Cerella and Joe Hoover for their constructive engagement with earlier versions of the text, as well as participants at the ‘Heidegger and the Global Age’ international workshop at the University of Sussex in October 2015 and during presentations at the 2016 International Studies Association Annual Convention in Atlanta, and at 2016 British International Studies Association Annual Conference in Edinburgh for their insightful feedback. NOTES 1 The lineage of the so-called global age is a matter of great debate: for many scholars it begins with colonial expansion and appropriation or ‘the modern/colonial world-system’. See Ramón Grosfoguel, ‘Colonial Difference, Geopolitics of Knowledge, and Global Coloniality in the Modern/Colonial Capitalist World-System’, Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 25, no. 3 (1 January 2002): 203. For others, it speaks to the interaction of social phenomena such as time-space compression and the globalization of struggles and the semantic shift we are witnessing in social theory. See Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash and Roland Robertson, eds., Global Modernities

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(London: Sage, 1996). For others still it is the temporal transition from modernity to postmodernity, to which a global neoliberalism is central, and is of a much shorter lineage. See Susanne Soederberg, Georg Menz and Philip G. Cerny, eds., Internalizing Globalization: The Rise of Neoliberalism and the Decline of National Varieties of Capitalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 2 See the response on the delegitimizing designation of the term ‘studies’ in Ignacio López-Calvo and Walter Mignolo, ‘ “Coloniality Is Not Over, It Is All Over”: Interview with Dr. Walter Mignolo (Nov. 2014. Part I)’, TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 6, no. 1 (1 January 2016): 1–10. 3 Lewis R. Gordon, ‘Race, Theodicy, and the Normative Emancipatory Challenges of Blackness’, South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 4 (21 September 2013): 733. 4 See, for instance, Neferti X. M. Tadiar, ‘Life-Times of Disposability within Global Neoliberalism’, Social Text 31, no. 2 (20 June 2013): 19–48. 5 Sylvia Wynter, ‘Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of Conscious Experience, and What It Is Like to Be “Black” ’, in National Identities and Sociopolitical Changes in Latin America, ed. Mercedes Durán-Cogan and Antonio Gómez-Moriana (New York: Routledge, 2001), 30–66; Sylvia Wynter, ‘The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism’, Boundary 2 12–13, no. 3–1 (1984): 19–70; and Katherine McKittrick and Sylvia Wynter, ‘Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations’, in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 10–89. 6 Leonard Horne, ‘Real Human Being’, The New Inquiry, 12 March 2015, 2. 7 Sylvia Wynter, ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument’, CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337. 8 Horne, ‘Real Human Being’, 2. 9 Ibid. 10 Linda Martín Alcoff, The Future of Whiteness (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2015), 93; on epistemic injustice, see Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); and José Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 11 Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004). 12 Martin Heidegger, ‘Traditional Language and Technological Language’, trans. Wanda Torres Gregory, Journal of Philosophical Research 23 (1998): 135. If read superficial as an endorsement of European superiority, Heidegger’s analyses would come under the critique of the ‘myth of modernity’; see, for example, Enrique D. Dussel, Javier Krauel and Virginia C. Tuma, ‘Europe, Modernity, and Eurocentrism’, Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 3 (2000): 465–78. 13 Martin Heidegger, Basic Concepts (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998), 76, 77. 14 Ibid., 70.



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15 See, for example, Wynter, ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being’; and McKittrick and Wynter, ‘Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?’. 16 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 3–35. 17 Heidegger, ‘Traditional Language and Technological Language’. 18 Heidegger, Basic Concepts, 70. 19 The poet Robert Duncan cited in Jerome Rothenberg, ‘Pre-Face to a Symposium on Ethnopoetics’, Alcheringa: Ethnopoetics 2, no. 2 (1976): 6. 20 Aníbal Quijano, ‘Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America’, International Sociology 15, no. 2 (1 June 2000): 216. 21 Aníbal Quijano, ‘Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America’, trans. Michael Ennis, Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 3 (2000): 534. 22 Ibid., my emphasis. 23 Ibid., 535. 24 Ibid., 548, my emphasis. 25 Nelson Maldonado-Torres, ‘The Topology of Being and the Geopolitics of Knowledge: Modernity, Empire, Coloniality’, City 8, no. 1 (2004): 32. 26 Cf. Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2011). 27 Wynter, ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being’; Sylvia Wynter, ‘The Ceremony Found: Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn, Its Autonomy of Human Agency and Extraterritoriality of (Self-)Cognition’, in Black Knowledges/Black Struggles: Essays in Critical Epistemology, ed. Jason R. Ambroise and Sabine Broeck (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 184–245. 28 Nelson Maldonado-Torres, ‘On the Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the Development of a Concept’, Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007): 243. 29 Coloniality is also profoundly gendered in its violence: ‘Coloniality is an order of things that put people of color under the murderous and rapist sight of a vigilant ego’ – an ego conquiro which racializes through ‘gender and sex’. Ibid., 248. 30 Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity. 31 Walter D. Mignolo, ‘Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of de-Coloniality’, Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (1 March 2007): 449–514. 32 Martin Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures: Insight Into That Which Is and Basic Principles of Thinking, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 17. 33 Wynter, ‘The Ceremony Found’, 42, brackets added. 34 Wynter, ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being’, 268. 35 Ibid., 260. 36 McKittrick and Wynter, ‘Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?’, 23. 37 Heidegger, Basic Concepts, 70. 38 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 1986), 13. 39 Ibid., 82. 40 Wynter, ‘Towards the Sociogenic Principle’; Sylvia Wynter, ‘Ethno or Socio Poetics’, Alcheringa: Ethnopoetics 2, no. 2 (1976): 78–94; and Walter D. Mignolo,

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‘Sylvia Wynter: What Does It Mean to Be Human?’, in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, 106–23. 41 For a longer discussion of the decolonial critique and its repercussions for ethical enquiry, see Louiza Odysseos, ‘Prolegomena to Any Future Decolonial Ethics: Coloniality, Poetics and “Being Human as Praxis” ’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 45, no. 3 (forthcoming 2017). 42 Charles Taylor, ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, in Weakening Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Gianni Vattimo, ed. Santiago Zabala (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), 57–76. 43 Mignolo, ‘Sylvia Wynter: What Does It Mean to Be Human?’, 113. 44 See the discussion of the evolution of the current descriptive statement, Man 2, in McKittrick and Wynter, ‘Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?’. 45 Heather Widdows, Global Ethics: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2011); Jürgen Habermas, Justification and Application. Remarks on Discourse Ethics, trans. Ciaran P. Cronin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994); and William Rehg, Insight and Solidarity: The Discourse Ethics of Jürgen Habermas (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997). 46 Gordon, ‘Race, Theodicy, and the Normative Emancipatory Challenges of Blackness’, 733. 47 Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity, 21. 48 Horne, ‘Real Human Being’, 1; cf. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 10. 49 Maldonado-Torres, ‘On the Coloniality of Being’, 261. 50 Ranjana Khanna, ‘Post-Palliative: Coloniality’s Affective Dissonance’, Postcolonial Text 2, no. 1 (31 December 2005). 51 Katherine McKittrick, ‘Yours in the Intellectual Struggle: Sylvia Wynter and the Realization of the Living’, in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, 5, 8. 52 Martin Heidegger, ‘Words’, in On the Way to Language, trans. Joan Stambaugh (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1982), 139–56; Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1982), 57–108. 53 Paolo Bartolini, ‘Renunciation: Heidegger, Agamben, Blanchot, Vattimo’, Comparative Critical Studies 6, no. 1 (1 February 2009): 76–77. 54 McKittrick and Wynter, ‘Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?’; for a discussion of humanity as ‘evaluative’ rather than descriptive, see William Rasch, ‘Human Rights as Geopolitics: Carl Schmitt and the Legal Form of American Supremacy’, Cultural Critique 54, no. 1 (2003): 120–47. 55 Horne, ‘Real Human Being’, 1–2. 56 Heidegger, ‘Traditional Language and Technological Language’, 135. 57 Ibid. 58 Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’; Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, in The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 115–54; and Michael E. Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics and Art (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991). 59 Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, 4.



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60 Ibid., 12. 61 Ibid., 14. 62 Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, 25. 63 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 96. 64 Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, 17. 65 Thomas Sheehan, Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift (London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015). 66 Wolf Kittler, ‘From Gestalt to Ge-Stell: Martin Heidegger Reads Ernst Jünger’, Cultural Critique 69, no. 1 (2008): 93. 67 Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, 17. 68 Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, 28. 69 Ibid., 25. 70 Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, 18. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid., 19, my emphasis. 73 Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, 26. 74 Ibid., 27. 75 Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, 19, for William Lovitt’s discussion of the translation of das Ge-stell as ‘Enframing’, see Ibid., xxix–xxx. Andrew Mitchell translates das Ge-stell as ‘positionality’, but I agree with Mahon O’Brien that the older translation captures the gathering and act of enfolding within that Heidegger’s usage means to convey. See Andrew Mitchell, translator’s foreword to Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, by Martin Heidegger, xi; and cf. Mahon O’Brien, Heidegger, History and the Holocaust (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 68–75. 76 David Scott mobilizes the term ‘conscripts’ in an interesting manner, cf. Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 77 Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, 28. 78 Ibid., 29. 79 Ibid. 80 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1968). 81 Maldonado-Torres, ‘On the Coloniality of Being’, 251. 82 Cf. Aimé Césaire, ‘Poetry and Knowledge’, in Lyric and Dramatic Poetry 1946–82, trans. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1990), xlii. 83 McKittrick and Wynter, ‘Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?’; and Césaire, ‘Poetry and Knowledge’, xlix. 84 Quijano, ‘Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America’; and Maldonado-Torres, ‘The Topology of Being’. 85 Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, 18. 86 Graeme Nicholson, ‘Truth and Unconcealedness’, Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual 4 (2014): 81, citing Cristina Lafont, Heidegger, Language, and

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World-Disclosure, trans. Graham Harman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 87 Heidegger, ‘Traditional Language and Technological Language’. 88 Césaire, ‘Poetry and Knowledge’. 89 Heidegger, ‘Traditional Language and Technological Language’, 141, emphasis in the original. 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid., emphasis in original. 93 Sheehan, Making Sense of Heidegger, xvi. 94 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Way to Language’, in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1982), 126. 95 Ibid., emphasis in original. 96 Jussi Backman, ‘The Transitional Breakdown of the Word: Heidegger and Stefan George’s Encounter with Language’, Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual 1 (2011): 64. 97 Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, 82. 98 Heidegger, ‘The Way to Language’, 126. 99 Backman, ‘The Transitional Breakdown of the Word’. See also the discussion of the disclosing possibilities of breakdown in the famous example of the hammer in Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 98–100. 100 Stefan George, Das Wort, in ‘Stefan George: Verschiedene Gedichte – Kapitel 5’ in Project Gutenberg-DE, accessed 26 September 2016, http://gutenberg.spiegel. de/buch/verschiedene-gedichte-3283/5. 101 Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, 60. 102 Ibid., 82–83. 103 Ibid., 86, emphasis in original. 104 Ibid., 104. 105 Heidegger, ‘Words’, 142. 106 Ibid. 107 Ibid., 147. 108 Ibid. 109 Ibid., 151. 110 Gary Wilder, ‘Thinking with Aimé Césaire’, The Work of Man Has Only Just Begun, 3 March 2016, http://cesairelegacies.cdrs.columbia.edu/political-legacy/ thinking-with-aime-cesaire/; citing the essay ‘Poetry and Knowledge’. 111 Césaire, ‘Poetry and Knowledge’, xlvii. 112 Heidegger, Being and Time; see also Martin Heidegger, Ontology – The Hermeneutics of Facticity, trans. John van Buren (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008). 113 Louiza Odysseos, The Subject of Coexistence: Otherness in International Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 114 Ibid., xxix–xxxii. 115 Heidegger, Being and Time, 126–30.



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116 See, for instance, John Haugeland, ‘Dasein’s Disclosedness’, The Southern Journal of Philosophy 28, no. S1 (1 March 1990): 51–73. 117 Odysseos, The Subject of Coexistence, xxix. 118 Heidegger, Being and Time, §27. 119 Miguel de Beistegui, Heidegger and the Political (London and New York: Routledge, 1997); and Francoise Dastur, Heidegger and the Question of Time, trans. Francois Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998). 120 Sheehan, Making Sense of Heidegger. 121 See the much longer discussion of this in Louiza Odysseos, ‘On the Way to Global Ethics? Cosmopolitanism, “Ethical” Selfhood and Otherness’, European Journal of Political Theory 2, no. 2 (1 April 2003): 183–207. 122 Heidegger, Being and Time, §39. 123 Heidegger, Basic Concepts, 70. 124 Martin Gak, ‘Heidegger’s Ethics and Levinas’s Ontology: Phenomenology of Prereflective Normativity’, Levinas Studies 9, no. 1 (2014): 151. 125 Ibid., 153. 126 Taylor, ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’. 127 The poet Robert Duncan cited in Rothenberg, ‘Pre-Face to a Symposium on Ethnopoetics’, 6. 128 See, for example, Odysseus, ‘On the Way to Global Ethics?’; see the concern Wynter expresses about human rights, McKittrick and Wynter, ‘Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?’, 39. 129 Christopher Fynsk, foreword: ‘Experiences of Finitude’, in The Inoperative Community, by Jean-Luc Nancy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), xiii. 130 Based on Heidegger’s thinking one could conceive of this disposition or sensibility as ‘liberating solicitude’ towards the other, see Peg Birmingham, ‘Ever Respectfully Mine: Heidegger on Agency and Responsibility’, in Ethics and Danger: Essays on Heidegger and Continental Thought, ed. Arleen B. Dallery, Charles E. Scott and P. Holley Roberts (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992), 109–24; and Odysseos, The Subject of Coexistence, 119–51. 131 Sylvia Wynter, ‘Human Being as Noun? Or Being Human as Praxis? Toward the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn: A Manifesto’ (unpublished, 2007), https://www.scribd.com/doc/237809437/ accessed 12 January 2017, Sylvia-Wynter-The-Autopoetic-Turn. 132 Mignolo, ‘Delinking’, 485. 133 Nelson Maldonado-Torres, ‘Race, Religion, and Ethics in the Modern/Colonial World’, Journal of Religious Ethics 42, no. 4 (1 December 2014): 705; see the discussion of the inseparability of ethics and politics in Wynter’s thought, David Scott and Sylvia Wynter, ‘The Re-Enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter’, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 4, no. 2 (September 2000): 119–207. 134 Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, in Pathmarks, trans. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 271.

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135 Mignolo, ‘Delinking’. 136 Maldonado-Torres, ‘Race, Religion, and Ethics’, 704. 137 Ibid., 703. 138 Bartolini, ‘Renunciation: Heidegger, Agamben, Blanchot, Vattimo’, 67. 139 McKittrick, ‘Yours in the Intellectual Struggle: Sylvia Wynter and the Realization of the Living’, 3–4; citing Maturana and Varela, brackets added. 140 Wynter, ‘Towards the Sociogenic Principle’, 31. 141 McKittrick and Wynter, ‘Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?’, 11, citing Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 73.

Chapter 13

World Order and Abendland* Heidegger on Global Renewal Fred R. Dallmayr

In public life, great challenges sometimes elicit great and memorable responses. One such occasion happened at the peak of the Cold War, in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis when the world was hovering at the brink of nuclear war and global disaster. Then U.S. president John F. Kennedy on June 10, 1963 delivered a speech at American University where he expressed a commitment to global peace and a balanced world order not dominated by one hegemonic power. There Kennedy said: ‘What kind of peace do I mean and what kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war . . . I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, and the kind that enables men and nations to grow, and to hope, and build a better life for their children – not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women’. And then he added these truly memorable words which could (and should) serve as inspiration for the entire world: ‘For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal’.1 We all know, of course, that only half a year later (in November) Kennedy was assassinated. Half a century later, President Obama chose the same location – American University – to deliver a speech in the middle of (what some call) Cold War II regarding another crisis: the Iran nuclear crisis. At this point, Obama stated: ‘Congressional rejection of this (Iran nuclear) deal leaves any U.S. administration . . . with one option: another war in the Middle East. I say this not to be provocative; I am stating a fact. . . . The choice we face is ultimately between diplomacy or some form of war’ (possibly a nuclear war).2 When Obama spoke these words, the world was in total disarray, ravaged by multiple wars; the world was not the balanced order of powers envisaged by Kennedy, but a global disorder in the grip of strategies for 297

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global domination. One should add that his speech was given in August 2015 at the seventieth anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an anniversary that should have stirred humanity’s conscience – if the latter had not been numbed by the incessant clamours of warfare. This is the world in which we live now: a world in which the lust for power and blood lust have been totally unleashed and where the danger of apocalypse is never far away. The question I want to raise in this chapter is: How can we find our way back to Kennedy’s vision of a balanced world order, a vision guided by respect for different societies and different cultures – and not only respect but empathy and care? Before embarking on this quest, I want first of all to take stock of our present situation; for, hopes and aspirations are chimeras if not informed by real conditions. Next, in proceeding on our journey, I choose among my mentors someone many would consider unlikely: Martin Heidegger. As I shall try to show, for Heidegger the crucial requirement to exit from our present predicaments is not a set of legal procedures or bureaucratic agencies, but a moral and spiritual turning or ‘metanoia’ opening humanity up for new and more peaceful possibilities. An important corollary of this change is the transformation of the so-called West – long acting as the privileged master of the universe – into a serene ‘evening land’ (Abendland) offering shelter and solace in the midst of our tormented world. A WORLD IN TORMENT The condition of our world today is not a matter of idle speculation. A quick glance at newspapers and public media reveals an undeniable fact: that our globe is in total disorder, in a state of virtual chaos and dissolution. Wherever one looks, one finds conflict and destruction, hot and cold wars, proxy warfare, flirtation with nuclear disaster, attempts at ethnic cleansing – in short, a triumphal sway of inhumanity. Military and semi-military clashes are aggravated by the prevalence of financial and economic disorder: the concentration of incredible wealth in small global and national elites, coupled with the economic stagnation of traditional working classes and the immense poverty or ‘immiseration’ of the vast under-classes in many ‘developing’ countries. Add to these factors the acceleration of the dangers of ‘global warming’, and the sense of global disorder is overwhelming. What is particularly distressing is that most of these plights are entirely human-made, and not the result of natural catastrophes, like tsunamis. The man-made sources of present – and future – global plights were frankly acknowledged by President Obama in his speech at American University. ‘There are opponents of this [diplomatic] deal’, he said, ‘who accept the choice of war. In fact, they argue that surgical strikes against Iran’s



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[nuclear] facilities will be quick and painless’. Without naming names, the opponents he referred to are the right-wing hardliners in Washington – often labelled ‘hawks’ or ‘neo-conservatives’ – for whom war is always not the last but the first option; operating often in the shadows of the ‘deep state’ (so-called), their ploys tendentially elude both constitutional and diplomatic constraints. Countering the opponent’s designs, Obama reminded readers of the costs of warfare, while also appealing to their own better judgment: ‘If we have learned anything from the last decade’, he stated, ‘it is that wars in general and wars in the Middle East in particular are anything but simple. The only certainty in war is human suffering, uncertain costs, unintended consequences. . . . How can we, in good conscience, justify war before we have tested a diplomatic agreement that achieves our objectives (and) that is supported by the rest of the world?’ By way of conclusion, the president invoked the testimony of his illustrious predecessor saying: ‘John F. Kennedy cautioned here more than 50 years ago at this university that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war. But . . . it is surely the pursuit of peace that is most needed in this world so full of strife’.3 An even more eloquent and fervent indictment of warmongering, and the resulting global disorder, was pronounced by Pope Francis a year earlier in a speech commemorating the victims of the First World War. In September 2014, during a visit to the Memorial and Cemetery in Redipuglia – containing the graves of thousands of soldiers from many countries – the pontiff said: ‘I now find myself here, on this place, able to say only one thing: War is madness. Whereas God carries forward the work of creation, and we men and women are called upon to participate in this work, war destroys. It ruins also the most beautiful work of his hands: human beings’. As one should note, war and destruction for the pontiff were not just random accidents or natural catastrophes; very often – in fact most often – they are engineered and promoted by designing people, that is by warmongers bent on spreading mayhem and inflicting maximum damage on life. As he continued: ‘Even today, after the disaster of the second World War, perhaps one can already speak of a third war: one fought piecemeal, with crimes, massacres, wanton destruction. . . . In today’s world, behind the scenes, there are interests, geopolitical strategies, lust for money and power, and there is the endless manufacture and sale of arms’. In the face of this grim scenario, Pope Francis asked humankind to step back from the brink of abyss and to undergo a radical metanoia: ‘I ask each of you, indeed all of you, to have a conversion of heart: to move from indifference to tears: for each one of the fallen of this senseless massacre’.4 Perhaps, to get a full sense of the global disorder in which we live today, it is appropriate to consult some international relations experts – not those (often called ‘realists’) comfortable with the prevailing status quo, but those (few in number) still imbued with a critical conscience. Among the latter one can

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mention such scholars as Richard Falk, John Ikenberry, and (most notably) Noam Chomsky. In recent decades, and with growing urgency, these experts have commented lucidly on the so-called new world order which came into being or was established after September 11. A major founding document in this respect is the so-called National Security strategy, promulgated by the White House on September 17, 2002. The ‘world order’ inaugurated by this document has been aptly described by Ikenberry as an ‘imperial grand strategy’ – a phrase also taken over by Noam Chomsky. As Ikenberry states, the strategy was and is based on the ‘fundamental commitment to maintain a unipolar world in which America has no peer competitor’. In terms of this strategy (whose principles have never been revoked or revised), the United States is presented as a state ‘seeking to parlay its momentary advantages into a world order in which it fully runs the show’. A major casualty of this unipolarity is the legacy of international law and global institutions whose role is seen as ‘of little value’ and ‘almost meaningless’. For Ikenberry, the global scenario enshrined in the document is not a genuine ‘order’ but rather a disorder fraught with immense risks of conflict, a scenario which ‘leaves the world more dangerous and divided – and the United States less secure’. Seconding this assessment, Chomsky famously quipped that ‘the new world order is one in which the new world gives [of tries to give] the orders’ – with the predictable results of global resentment and terrorist revenge.5 An important example of the sidelining of international norms and conventions is the document’s endorsement of (not only preemptive but) ‘preventive war’ – a notion for which there is no warrant whatever in international law and the comity of nations. Basically, the ‘imperial grand strategy’ allocated to the globally hegemonic power the right to use military force not only to counter direct or imminent aggression, but to eliminate purely hypothetical, imagined and even invented threats. Under the rules of traditional international law, the active pursuit of preventive war, that is the policy of ‘anticipatory self-defense’, falls within the category of war crimes – which is no deterrent for ‘realist’ hardliners. Not long after the announcement of the doctrine, preventive war was unleashed in 2003 against Iraq. Richard Falk minces no words in critically assessing the case. Drawing on egregious historical precedents, he finds it ‘inescapable’ that the Iraq war was ‘a crime against peace of the sort for which surviving German leaders were indicted, prosecuted, and punished at the Nuremberg Trials’. Unfortunately violations or ruptures of norms have a tendency of being transformed by perpetrators into new rules or a ‘new normal’. In Chomsky’s words: ‘With the grand strategy not only officially declared but also implemented, the new norm of preventive war takes its place in the canon’. Having established a precedent, he adds, America may find it possible, even irresistible to turn to ‘harder cases’: ‘There are many tempting possibilities: Iran, Syria, the Andean region, and a number of others.



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The prospects depend in large part on whether the ‘second superpower’ [Russia] can be intimidated and contained’.6 MACHENSCHAFT AND PLANETARY CRIMINALS As frankly stated by the framers, the central goal of the 2002 strategy was to render global supremacy unchallengeable and its reach of control airtight. In the words of the document, American might had to be made ‘strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries’ from pursuing policies ‘in hopes of surpassing, or equalling, the power’ of the global hegemon. Differently put: the aim was to prevent the rise of any goals or orientations eluding the grip of global power. But how plausible was and is this aim? Although persuasive perhaps to hardliners, the goal of global control is deeply flawed and bound to suffer shipwreck, because clearly, there are aims and orientations which constitutively elude the grasp of political control. Well known and firmly attested in the course of human history are the concerns for truth, justice and the good life. Inhabiting a realm beyond manipulation, these concerns cannot be produced or engineered by, or made simple accessories of, political power. To be sure, there are incessant efforts to ensnare truth and justice in the machinations of the powerful, or to reduce them to ideological slogans. But these efforts never completely succeed – as shown by the example of illustrious truth-sayers throughout history, that is courageous people willing to ‘speak truth to power’ (often at great cost). Although frequently persecuted and/or victimized, their testimony lives on. Thus, to give some examples, Gandhi’s ‘truth’ survived his assassination, just as the ‘truth’ of Martin Luther King Jr, survived his violent death. Another concern eluding absolute power is human ‘freedom’ – although the latter is also ideologically twisted and abused. When the globally hegemonic country describes itself as ‘free world’, freedom seems to be an accessory of power – an equation challenged by the biblical admonition that ‘the truth [not power] shall set you free’.7 The proceeding considerations resonate closely with the work of a philosopher whose invocation, in this context, may seem counter-intuitive. As is well known, Martin Heidegger’s work is controversial precisely for political reasons, having to do with his embroilment with the ruling German regime (in 1933–1934) – an embroilment which, to many, involved the surrender of philosophy to political power. Whatever the underlying motivations may have been (Karl Jaspers compared it to Plato’s visit to Syracuse), the embroilment clearly was an egregious blunder – as Heidegger himself came to realize subsequently. It was a blunder not only because of the particularly vicious character of the regime, but because the rapprochement violated the basic character of his own thought, above all its commitment to truth. In 1930,

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several years before the ill-fated embroilment, Heidegger delivered a lecture entitled ‘On the Essence of Truth’ where the basic nature of truth was equated not with political power but with human ‘freedom’, with the latter being far removed from power-seeking or power-lust. In terms of the lecture, ‘truth’ was to be conceived not as a dogma or finished doctrine, but as an ongoing quest or search – a quest which presupposes an existential openness to the disclosure of Being, an openness untrammelled by prejudice or narrow selfinterest. In Heidegger’s words: Openness requires a ‘being free’ for what discloses itself; hence the quest for truth is ‘the emblem of freedom’. As one should note, freedom here does not mean wilful human caprice or manipulation. Rather, freedom for disclosure allows encountered beings or phenomena to be what they are: ‘Thus freedom reveals itself [not as power but] as the ability to let beings be (Seinlassen)’.8 The noncongruence of Heidegger’s political embroilment with his philosophy, however, is evident not only from the cited lecture. More ample testimony can be derived from his magnum opus, Being and Time, published three years earlier. Some of the key terms introduced in that work can be interpreted as being not only loosely at odds, but diametrically opposed to the fascist ideology emerging during this period. A well-known key term employed in the text is ‘being-in-the-world’, a hyphenated expression seeking to pinpoint the basic character of human existence (Dasein). Sharply opposed to the dichotomous modern conception deriving from Descartes – ego cogitans/res extensa – Heidegger’s expression presents human beings as closely enmeshed in, and even co-constituted by, ‘world’, where the latter term embraces fellow-beings, nature, and the cosmos. Although the hyphens of the phrase may sometimes be frayed or tattered, the basic relationality remains intact. To a large extent, the character of the hyphens is captured in another key term of Being and Time: that of ‘care’ (Sorge). What this key team signals, in a crucial way, is that the relation between humans and the world is not purely cognitive or epistemological – seeing that detached knowledge or cognition of the world can readily equal domination (in line with Bacon’s dictum that ‘knowledge is power’). Again, like the hyphens of Dasein, ‘care’ for Heidegger comes in different modalities and shapes, sometimes deteriorating into antagonism or indifference; however; even in its deficiency, carelessness still testifies to care as the standard. The highest form of care in inter-human relations, for Heidegger, is ‘solicitude’ (Fürsorge), and especially one which cares for the other’s freedom or helps the other to be or remain free (‘anticipating-liberating care’). Thus, the highest type of care is again the practice of ‘letting-be’ (Seinlassen).9 As it appears, it took some time – regrettably a few years – until Heidegger came to recognize the utter incompatibility of his philosophy with the reigning ideology. The recognition occurred in stages, but steadily, in the course of



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what is called his Kehre or ‘turning’ – a change which signalled not a turning away from his earlier work but rather a deeper realization of the actual point or significance of his thought. An important signpost of the reorientation were lecture courses devoted to Friedrich Nietzsche (stretching from 1936 to 1941), courses that revealed his growing discomfort or dissatisfaction with the latter’s celebration of ‘will’ and ‘will to power’ (although the discomfort remained for a time ambivalent).10 More forthright and telling in their articulation were texts written roughly during the same period (but published only recently, first in the original and still later in English translation). In the present context, three of these writings deserve primary attention: Beiträge zur Philosophie (Contributions to Philosophy, 1936); Besinnung (Mindfulness, 1938–1939), and Geschichte des Seyns (The History of Being, 1939–1940). Despite varying emphases and focal concerns, the three texts denounce with increasing vehemence and sharpness the central defect of the ruling regime: the abandonment of the quest for ‘truth’, and as a corollary, the dismissal of genuine human ‘freedom’. In terms of my previous discussion, the crucial vice of the regime is seen in its inability to practise anything even remotely akin to ‘letting be’ – in effect, in its proclivity to replace such practice by the very opposite policy of totalizing manipulation and control which Heidegger came to call Machenschaft. Among the three texts, Beiträge is most dramatic and existentially challenging. Basically, it delineates a trajectory or detailed itinerary of transformation leading from the prevailing condition of corruption in the direction of a public and existential renewal. The successive steps of the transformation are clearly marked, leading from a ‘pre-view’ and ‘foreplay’ to a ‘leap’ and a final new ‘grounding’ – moves which cannot be analysed here in detail. Apart from issuing a moral-existential challenge, the text is dramatic also on a mundane-political level. One of the direct targets of the text is the regime’s motto of ‘total mobilization’ – a motto clearly vitiating any possible quest for truth. ‘Such a totalizing worldview’, Heidegger writes, ‘must close itself off against the probing of its own ground and the premises of its actions’; it must do so, because otherwise ‘total ideology would put itself in question’. It is in connection with this critique that the term Machenschaft surfaces prominently. The rise of ideological world views, Heidegger writes, is the result of modern anthropocentric metaphysics, and in this context ‘worldview means Machenschaft’. Basically, the term designates the prevalence of human ‘making’ (machen), not in the sense of genuine praxis or creativity but of fabrication and manipulation. Preceded by biblical accounts of creation (as fabrication), the modern sway of Machenschaft was decisively inaugurated by Descartes’s focus on the ego cogitans and its cognitive control; subsequently, the approach was further solidified by the rise of mathematical physics and technology (Technik). Against this background Heidegger asks:

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‘What is Machenschaft?’ and responds: ‘It is the scheme of complete explanatory calculability whereby every being is uniformly equated with every other being – and thereby alienated from itself’ and thus controlled.11 Jointly with the critique of Machenschaft, Beiträge offers critical comments on the terms ‘power’, ‘violence’ and related concepts. Closely associated with the self-seeking and manipulative character of Machenschaft, the notions of ‘power’ (Macht) and ‘violence’ (Gewalt) are marked by domineering qualities far removed from letting-be. In Heidegger’s usage, violence signifies the forced or wilful attempt to change things or conditions without attention to truth: ‘Wherever change is sought merely factually or empirically [on the ‘ontic’ level], violence is needed’. In turn, power (Macht) stands in the service of wilful machination by seeking to harness and control the possibilities of violence. By contrast, genuine ‘authority’ for Heidegger relies on dispassionate, not self-serving insight and thus happens only ‘in the realm of freedom’ and its openness to truth; by virtue of this quality, such authority has ‘no need of power and violence’ and yet is more potent as an agency of change. The possibility of this potency, however, is repressed or thwarted under the reign of modern world views, especially totalizing world view ideologies which leave no room for freedom and reflection. Under the sway of Machenschaft, human beings are streamlined or homogenized into a uniform entity called Volk – a favourite term of the Nazi regime – whose behaviour can be explained, predicted and manipulated in accordance with positivist sociology. Although frequently extolled as an oracle, the ‘people’ in this case are only the pliant tools or resources of Machenschaft whose only concern is the efficient utilization and enhancement of its resources.12 The critique of Machenschaft and its corollaries was continued and sharpened in Besinnung. As an important feature, the text offers further terminological refinements. In Heidegger’s words: ‘Machenschaft means the all-pervasive and totalizing ‘makability’ of everything’ and the routine acceptance of this process to insure ‘unconditional calculation and control’. In pursuing its levelling path, Machenschaft employs violence which, in turn, is stabilized through the ‘secure possession of power (Macht)’. In modernity, the aims of Machenschaft are promoted and abetted by technology (Technik) that reduces human beings to mere resources whose status is determined by utility and productivity. To offer a telling example of this trend, Heidegger – somewhat surprisingly and boldly – zeroes in on a speech that Hitler gave in 1939 and which contained the statement: ‘There is no stance which would not receive its ultimate justification from its utility for the totality (of the nation)’. Assessing the statement from a philosophical angle, Heidegger raises a number of probing questions, such as the following: What is ‘totality’ or ‘collectivity’ (Gesamtheit), and who represents it and determines its goals? What is the ‘utility’ of a stance or posture? Where does one find the



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standard of utility, and who determines that standard? Summing up these and related questions, he arrives at a general indictment which clearly contradicts Hitler’s world view: What is ‘totality’ if not the quantitative extension of a particular conception of humans as singular egos? What is a ‘posture’ (Haltung)? Does this term capture the basic nature of human Dasein? If not, what sense can one make of the justification of posture by totality and collective utility? Does posture not signify the denial of the essential questionability (Fraglichkeit) of human Dasein? Are humans here not fixated as geared toward the control and mastery of beings (in the midst of the prevalent abandonment of/by Being, Seinsverlassenheit)?13

Above and beyond the critique of Machenschaft, Besinnung adumbrates important guideposts for something radically different or ‘other’: namely the recovery of attentive care for Being (in all its forms), of the practice of genuine ‘letting-be’ outside the reach of manipulation and control. As before, Heidegger distinguishes between power and violence, on the one hand, and genuine authority grounded in truth and freedom, on the other. To characterize this grounding properly, Besinnung introduces a new vocabulary, by presenting the truth of Being as something ‘power-free’ (das Machtlose) located beyond power and non-power (jenseits von Macht und Unmacht). As he emphasize, ‘power-free’ does not mean powerless or impotent, because the latter remains fixated on power, now experienced as a lack: From an everyday angle, the truth of Being may appear powerless; but this is only a semblance resulting from the particular mode of Being’s disclosure in our time: the mode of ‘refusal’ (Verweigerung), concealment or withdrawal. Due to this refusal, Being can never be dragged into human machinations, into struggles between the powerful and the powerless; but precisely in this Verweigerung it reveals its dignity – a dignity that ‘cannot be matched by any power or superpower’. To be sure, access to its realm is difficult and profoundly obstructed by the Machenschaft of our age. A crucial pathway through and beyond these obstructions is precisely ‘Besinnung’ (mindfulness) which opens a glimpse into (what Heidegger calls) the ‘time-space-play’ (Zeit-Spiel-Raum) of the disclosure and happening of Being. Such mindfulness, he adds, can hone the sense for a crossroads or parting of ways that determines ‘whether Machenschaft finally overwhelms human beings’ or ‘whether Being discloses its truth again as a need’.14 Further glimpses into the turning experienced during this period are provided in Die Geschichte des Seyns (The History of Being), a series of texts dating from the beginning of the Second World War. In light of the grim historical context, the language here is even more intense than before and the political references are still more pointed and acerbic. Central to the texts is again the critique of Machenschaft and usability; closely linked with power

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and violence, Machenschaft is said to be grounded ultimately in ‘will’ (to power) and rampant self-centredness (‘subjectivity’). When, as an instrument of power, violence or brutality becomes predominant, matters are starkly simplified: everything is geared then towards the ‘unconditional annihilation (Vernichtung) of opposing forces with unconditional means’ (possibly nuclear means?). The end result is annihilation ‘for its own sake’ (Derrida later calls it ‘in the name of the name’). The unleashing of brutal violence carries in its train the ‘devastation’ (Verwüstung) of everything, in the sense that it spreads a ‘desert’ (Wüste) where nothing can grow any longer – especially not any solicitude for being or any openness to the truth of Being. A particularly vivid and harrowing sign of this devastation is the hankering for warfare – a warfare that, due to the totalizing ambitions of Machenschaft, now turns into ‘total war’ (totaler Krieg) bent on destruction without remainder. At a time of steadily globalizing ambitions of power, Heidegger adds, warfare necessarily becomes ‘limitless’ (grenzenlos), with the result that ‘total wars’ turn into global or ‘world wars’ in the service of an ‘unleashed Machenschaft’.15 The critique of total violence and war is paralleled in the texts by an intensification of concrete political polemics, Die Geschichte des Seyns openly ridicules fascist leaders for their self-glorification as ‘mighty rulers’ (Machtlaber) whose prime achievement is their ‘seizure of power’ (Machtergreifung). Leaders, Heidegger writes, are never ‘possessors of power’ (Machthaber) but rather puppets in the grip of Macht and Machenschaft; they cannot ‘seize’ or ‘possess’ power because they are ‘possessed by it’ (in the mode of an obsession). The texts also critique National Socialism directly by lampooning its chosen terminology. Drawing on the argument that modernity is anchored in ‘unconditional self-centeredness’, Heidegger comments that ‘the consequence of this anchoring is the ‘nationalism’ of nations and the ‘socialism’ of the Volk’. In line with this attack, the texts also take aim at a central ingredient of German fascism: its biological racism. In Heidegger’s words: ‘The concept of race (Rasse) and the calculations in terms of race derive from the construal of being as self-centeredness’ (subjectivity, hence from Machenschaft). ‘Cultivation of race (Rassenpflege)’, he adds, ‘is always linked with power politics’; as a result, racial doctrines (Rassenlehre) are never purely scientific-biological but always geared towards racial domination and ‘superiority’. Despite the lampooning of political leaders as being ‘possessed’ or in the grip of power, Heidegger (rightly) is not willing to exculpate such leaders of their deeds, especially their ‘criminal deeds’ (Verbrechen). Given the unleashing of Machenshaft and unconditional violence, he writes, our age also produces ‘the great criminals’ (die grossen Verbrecher), criminals whose deeds far exceed ordinary human standards. ‘There is no punishment’, he adds, ‘which would be sufficiently great to punish these criminals’ – people who at one point are referred to as ‘planetary master criminals’ (planetarische Hauptverbrecher).16



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CONCLUSION: PATHS TOWARDS GLOBAL RENEWAL By comparison with the preceding texts, Heidegger’s post-war writings are marked by greater steadiness and serenity. In many ways, his earlier views on Macht and Machenschaft are continued and revised in his reflections on technology under the rubric of Gestell (Enframing).17 In the professional literature, these reflections are often criticized as too radical or extreme, if not as signs of a hankering for rustic backwardness. As recent developments relating to ‘global warming’, however, indicate, his worries about an untamed or run-away technology were far from exaggerated or outlandish. What is most important to note in the present context is the overall continuity of Heidegger’s concerns; despite a certain shift of focus and terminology, his post-war writings remain closely linked with his earlier critique of political machinations, especially of globalizing ambitions for power resulting in rampant global disorder. What is most intriguing and appealing in his later writings, for present purposes, is the endeavour to chart pathways to recovery, that is pathways leading beyond and away from the dangers of global annihilation (Vernichtung) and devastation (Verwüstung). In this respect, a crucial point needs to be kept in mind: these pathways cannot possibly take the form of political platforms or marching order; thus, they cannot possibly rely on Maschenschaft linked with coercive power or violence. Differently put: the ways to recovery cannot directly confront or engage the strategies of world domination; located on a completely different plane, they must discard these strategies in the manner of ‘passing-by’ (Vorbeigang). In Heidegger’s work, a chief means of preserving the integrity of the pathways is the turn to poetry and poetic language. As is well known, during the time of his Kehre, Hölderlin became his favourite poet, chosen mainly for offering an antidote to Nietzsche’s fascination with ‘will to power’. In the post-war period, other poets were added to Heidegger’s literary pantheon, especially Rainer Maria Rilke and Georg Trakl. In 1953, Heidegger wrote and published an essay titled ‘Georg Trakl: A Discussion of His Poetic Work’. The title signals the interpretive aim immediately: discussion (Erörterung) means the effort to find the locus or site (Ort) of Trakl’s poetry. Site here is not a geographic location, a particular place on a map; rather, it intimates an entirely different region where ‘letting-be’ and freedom’s truth can happen. In Heidegger’s words: ‘The site, as an enabling potency, gathers and sustains everything it embraces – though not in the mode of a confining closure, but by permeating everything with its radiance and thus releasing it into its being’ (i.e., letting it be). This is clearly not a site which can be occupied, possessed or controlled. It is a completely ‘other’ plane, a site which allows for what Heidegger in other contexts calls an ‘other beginning’ (anderer Anfang).18 In trying to characterize this site, Heidegger initially turns to one of Trakl’s lines which reads: ‘Strange is the soul on earth’. On the surface, the line seems

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to concur with traditional metaphysics and its ‘two-world’ theory where ‘soul’ counts as something imperishable and otherworldly, in contrast to the flux of worldly existence. In Plato’s doctrine, the soul belongs to the intelligible or supersensible realm; to the extent that it inhabits the sensible world, it does so as a castaway desperately yearning to terminate its exile. Curiously, however, the verse is part of a poem titled ‘Springtime of the Soul’, a poem that contains no hint of a supersensible world. Seeking guidance from etymology, Heidegger notes that the German fremd (strange) in its Old High German origins (fram) means being underway or journeying abroad. Thus, strangeness is related to wandering and peregrination, but a wandering not synonymous with aimless nomadism. Instead, peregrination or journeying implies a search for home as the proper ‘site’: ‘Almost unknowingly, the strange soul follows a call that solicits it on a path into its own’. What is this site, and where does the path point? Trakl’s verse intimates the answer by speaking of the ‘earth’ (as abode of the soul). In this sense, the verse highlights the meaning of ‘soul’ rather than depicting its exile. ‘The earth’, Heidegger states, in a passage resonating deeply with today’s ecological crisis and global devastation, ‘is precisely the place which the wandering social so far was unable to reach. The soul still seeks the earth; it does not flee from it. This fulfils the soul’s being: through wandering to seek the earth so that it may poetically build and dwell on it, and thus may be able to save the earth as earth’.19 Homecoming to the earth, however, is by no means a straight itinerary or a simple return to familiar surroundings – because the journey is undertaken by the soul of the stranger (Fremdling). Homecoming in this case involves the most distant peregrination and, in fact, a journey even through the valley of death. In Trakl’s poetry, the strange soul is also referred to as something ‘dark’, ‘solitary’, ‘silent’, and sometimes as ‘pale’ or ‘dead’. In one of his poems, the stranger’s soul is called upon by a thrush ‘to go under’ (in den Untergang), and another poem called ‘Seven-Song of Death’ speaks starkly of ‘man’s decomposing or rotting (verwest) form’. As Heidegger emphasizes, however, going-under and decomposition here are still part of peregrination and by no means a terminal point or catastrophic ending. ‘Death’, he writes, ‘denotes here poetically that ‘going under’ or undergoing into which the strange soul is called’; its death consequently signals ‘not decay but instead the trespassing and leaving behind of the decomposing figure of man’. In terms of his essay, this decomposing figure stands basically for traditional humanity, for what Nietzsche called the ‘last man’. What is the source of this decomposition, the curse engendering this rotting state? Here is Heidegger’s analysis: The curse weighing on decomposing humanity consists in the fact that the latter is struck apart by discord among nations, tribes, and races (Zwietracht der Geschlechter). In this discord, each party abandons itself to the unleashed fury



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of the disjointed and utter wildness of animality. It is not difference as such but enmity which is the curse. In the turmoil of blind wildness, enmity carries humankind into irreconcilable division (Entzweiung), thereby banishing each party into stark isolation.20

It is only by passing through this dark valley that a pathway to recovery may be found. The strangeness of the stranger’s soul points ultimately beyond the divisiveness of decomposition; the stranger is, in fact, ‘Other to the others’, that is Other to the decomposing humankind. In this manner, the stranger is a guidepost for a new dawn, another beginning. The proper path, we read, is indicated by a generation ‘whose difference journeys ahead out of enmity into the gentleness of a mutual entwining (Zwiefalt), thus following the stranger’s footsteps’. In Trakl’s poetry, the stranger is also called ‘the departed one’ (der Abgeschiedene) – not in the sense of his simple disappearance but in that of a departure or farewell from self-centred life forms in the expectancy of an ‘other ascent’ (anderer Aufgang). Returning to the site of Trakl’s poetry, Heidegger at this juncture circumscribes this site pointedly through the term ‘apartness’ or ‘departedness’ (Abgeschiedenheit) – a term borrowed from Meister Eckhart for whom apartness, signalling releasement from worldly bondage, was a precondition of truth-seeking (and God-seeking).21 In Heidegger’s reading, the path to renewal leads through estrangement, apartness and even ‘death’ seen as a transition. In his words: Apartness has a cleansing and purifying quality; it operates as ‘pure spirit’ or purifying spirit. In this capacity, it rekindles or arouses a pristine childhood guiding it to a ‘golden new beginning’. Abgeschiedenheit, from this angle, is not a place of isolation or abandonment, but a site of renewed gathering: It is ‘a gathering through which humankind is sheltered again into a stiller childhood and the latter, in turn, into the dawn of another beginning’.22 As can be seen, the stranger’s journey is undertaken not for its own sake but for the sake of a latent promise, an ‘unborn’ possibility. In this respect, Trakl’s poetry speaks not merely of a fictive peregrination but intimates a distinct historical panorama: the unfolding story of modern humankind. In venturing abroad, the stranger’s soul departs from traditional and decaying ways of life while opening up space for the dawn of new modes of being. Located on the site of apartness, Heidegger writes, Trakl’s poetry ‘adumbrates the homecoming of yet-unborn humankind into the quiet beginning of its stiller nature’. Its language ‘emanates from transition (Übergang)’, a transition leading from the dusk of descent to ‘the dawn of a quieter, still impending ascent’. Noting Trakl’s frequent reference to dusk or evening twilight, Heidegger indicates even more clearly the historical panorama: by drawing a connection between this twilight and the Occident or Western ‘evening land’ (Abendland), a connection supported by the titles of some Trakl’s poems (such as ‘Evening

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Land’ and ‘Occidental Song’). Seen in this light, he states, the location inhabited by Trakl’s poetry is the site of apartness and, more concretely, the site of the ‘evening land’ (Abendland). As a place of apartness, he adds, this Abendland is ‘older and thus earlier’ than the land conceived as the ‘European West’ and indeed than the locus of so-called Western civilization. For, nurtured by apartness, Abendland might herald ‘the beginning of an ascending epoch or world-year’.23 In underscoring dawn and ascendancy, Heidegger takes strong exception to a mentality of impending doom and gloom, an outlook rendered fashionable by Oswald Spengler’s book Decline of the West (Untergang des Abendlandes). Countering prophesies of doom he states: ‘Sheltered in apartness, the Abendland does not go down in decay’; instead, ‘it lies in wait for its inhabitants’ as a land of transit and promised recovery. To be sure, transit here implies transformation and change, even radical change. As interpreted by Heidegger, Trakl’s poetry envisages a profound transformation of the ‘West’ (or Occident) and not simply its persistence as a place of the technological-military-economic mastery of the globe. As an antidote to global domination, his work holds out the vision of another possibility: the vision of a more peaceful global dwelling, of a ‘gentler entwinement’ of humankind. To this extent, Heidegger writes, Trakl can be seen as the poet of a ‘still concealed Abendland’ and of a still concealed but impending world order.24 With these words, we have returned – or so it seems to me – to President Kennedy’s speech in June 1963 at American University, when he outlined his vision of global order and peace. To recall his words, mentioned at the beginning of these pages; What kind of peace do I mean and what kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, and the kind that enables men and nations to grow, and to hope, and build a better life for their children – not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women.

As a seasoned politician, Kennedy was fully aware of the slurs hurled at this vision by cynical ‘realists’: ‘Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it is ‘unreal’. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. Our problems are man-made; therefore, they can also be solved by man’. Finally, let me repeat his concluding words: ‘For in the last analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal’.25



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NOTES * A version of this chapter has appeared in Fred Dallmayr, Against Apocalypse. Recovering Humanity’s Wholeness (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 23–38. 1 Robert Parry, ‘Obama’s Pragmatic Appeal for Iran Peace’, Consortium News, 5 August 2015, 5. 2 Ibid., 2. 3 Ibid., 2–3. Regarding the ‘deep state’ compare, for example Marc Ambinder and D. B. Grady, Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry (Hoboken, NY: Wiley, 2013); and Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 4 Pope Francis, ‘Homily in Redipuglia, Italy’, 13 September 2014, https:// w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/homilies/2014/documents/papafrancesco_20140913_omelia-sacrario-militare-redipuglia.html. 5 See White House, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, 17 September 2002; also G. John Ikenberry, ‘America’s Imperial Ambition’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 81 (September–October 2002), 44–60; Liberal Order and Imperial Ambitions (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2006); and Noam Chomsky, ‘Imperial Grand Strategy’, in his Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003), 11; World Order Old and New (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 6 Chomsky, ‘Imperial Grand Strategy’, 20; Zia Mian and Smitu Kothari, ‘Resisting the Global Domination Project: An Interview with Professor Richard Falk’, Frontline 20, no. 8, 12–25 April 2003, accessed 1 January 2016, http://www.frontline. in/static/html/fl2008/stories/20030425004002300.htm. Compare also Richard A. Falk, The Declining World Order: America’s Imperial Geopolitics (New York: Routledge, 2004); Falk, The Great Terror War (New York: Olive Branch Press, 2003); Falk, At the Nuclear Precipice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); and Richard A. Falk, Irene Gendzier and Robert Jay Lifton, eds., Crimes of War: Iraq (New York: Nation Books, 2006). 7 See John 8:32: ‘You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free’. Regarding Gandhi, see Erik H. Erikson, Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence (New York: Norton & Co., 1993); also my ‘Satyagrapha: Gandhi’s Truth Revisited’, in my Alternative Visions: Paths in the Global Village (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 105–21. 8 Martin Heidegger, ‘On the Essence of Truth’, in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 125, 127. As one can see, Heidegger’s lecture amplifies the biblical saying that ‘the truth will make you free’ by adding: ‘freedom will make you able to pursue the truth’. As one may note, Heidegger’s lecture was almost contemporaneous with another lecture ‘Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit’ (1930/31); and see Martin Heidegger, Wegmarken (GA9), ed. Friederich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1967), 109–44. 9 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 11th ed. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1967), par. 26 and 41, 117–25, 191–96; Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 153–62, 235–41.

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10 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961); for an English translation see Heidegger, Nietzsche, 4 vols., trans. David Farrell Krell, Frank A. Capuzzi and Joan Stambaugh (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979/1987). According to Hannah Arendt, it is possible to locate Heidegger’s ‘Kehre’ or turning in the shift of mood or tone occurring between the lectures of 1936–1937 and the later wartime lectures (on nihilism). See Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 2; Willing (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 172–73. 11 Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (GA65), ed. Friederich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1989), 38, 40, 126–32. For an English translation (not followed here), see Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999). The critique of world view ideologies was continued by Heidegger in ‘Die Zeit des Weltbildes’ (1938), where he denounced the increasingly virulent ‘contest of worldviews’ or clash of ideologies; and see Heidegger, Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1950), 69–104. 12 Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie, 50–51, 140, 282. Compare in this context Hannah Arendt, ‘What Is Authority?’, in Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (Cleveland, OH: Meridian Books, 1954), 91–141. 13 Martin Heidegger, Besinnung (GA66), ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1997), 16–17, 122–23. For an English translation (not followed here), see Heidegger, Mindfulness, trans. Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary (London: Continuum, 2006). 14 Heidegger, Besinnung, 15–17, 187–88. I am indebted to Ziarek for the felicitous rendering of machtlos as ‘power-free’. See especially Krzysztof Ziarek, Language after Heidegger (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013). 15 Martin Heidegger, Die Geschichte des Seyns (GA69), ed. Peter Trawny (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1998), 46–50, 64, 69. 16 Ibid., 44, 63, 77–78, 180, 209. 17 An important revision in the writings on technology is the refusal to treat the latter simply as an outgrowth of self-centred or anthropocentric machination. While shying away from the notion of a technological ‘destiny’, Heidegger seeks to preserve even in this case an element of disclosure. See especially his ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ in Basic Writings, 287–317. 18 The essay of 1953, mentioned earlier, was subsequently given the revised title ‘Die Sprache im Gedicht’ and incorporated into Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959), 35–82. For an English version, titled ‘Language in the Poem’, see Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971; paperback 1982), 159–98. Compare also Heidegger, Über den Anfang (GA70), ed. Paola-Ludovika Coriando (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2005). Regarding his earlier turn to Hölderlin, see my ‘Heidegger,



World Order and Abendland 313

Hölderlin, and Politics’, in my The Other Heidegger (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 132–48. 19 Heidegger, ‘Language in the Poem’, 159–63. 20 Ibid., 165–68. 21 Meister Eckhart, ‘Von der Abgeschicdenheit’, in Meister Eckhart’s Mystische Schriften, ed. Gustav Landauer (Marburg: Pandora, 1978), 185. 22 Heidegger, ‘Language in the Poem’, 170–71, 173. 23 Ibid., 184–86, 191. 24 Ibid., 194, 197. 25 Parry, ‘Obama’s Pragmatic Appeal for Iran Peace’, 5.

Index

Abendland (‘evening land’), 17, 298, 310 Abrahamic religions, 56, 192 – 93, 202 actualitas, 38 agora, 15, 224 – 28, 231n42, 231nn44 – 47 aletheia, 13, 162 – 63, 171 – 73, 179, 226 alienation, 10, 53 – 54, 64, 72 – 76, 105n44, 110 al-Qaeda, 44, 47 Althusser, Louis, 85 Anaximander, 256, 260, 261, 264, 266nn22 – 23 Anders, Bill, 1 annihilation, 17, 32, 54, 58, 138, 197, 306. See also nihilism Anthropocene, 15, 216, 233, 244 – 45 anthropocentrism, 15, 233, 243, 245, 303 anthropogenesis, 221 anthropos, 15, 233, 244 – 45 Antigone (Sophocles), 148 – 49 anxiety, 104n38, 139 – 40, 142 – 43, 175, 249n8, 285 Apollo 8 (spaceflight mission), 1 – 2, 63 Aquinas, Thomas, 184n23 Arendt, Hannah, 8, 11, 18, 109 – 10, 113, 130, 253 – 58, 260 – 61, 263 – 64, 312n10 arete, 288 Aristotle, 31, 36, 57, 171, 184n23, 202, 234 – 35, 237, 245

Aufhebung (‘sublation’), 204 Augenblick (‘moment of in-sight’), 257 – 58, 265 authentic/inauthentic, 125 – 30, 140, 146 Axelos, Kostas, 200 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 148 Bacon, Francis, 302 Badiou, Alain, 89 Balibar, Étienne, 253, 257, 264 – 65 Basic Concepts (Heidegger), 270 Bedeutungsganze (‘totality-ofsignifications’), 6, 31 Being and Time (Heidegger), 2 – 3, 6, 104n38, 123 – 25, 134n65, 138, 145 – 48, 150, 183n19, 198, 259, 285, 302 belonging: and politics, 16, 253, 255 – 58, 261 – 64 Benjamin, Walter, 9, 113 Benyus, Janine, 217 – 18, 227 Besinnung (Heidegger), 20n23, 303 – 5 Bimbenet, Étienne, 230n38 biomimetic cities, 15, 217 – 18, 223, 227 – 28 biomimicry, 14, 217 – 18, 224, 228 biopolitics, 122; and disposability, 270 – 72, 279, 285, 289 biosphere, 217, 233, 242, 246 – 47

315

316

Index

Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon), 274, 282 borders, 253 – 55, 263 – 65 boredom, 139 – 40, 142 – 43 Borman, Frank, 1 – 2 Braungart, Michael, 218 Bremen and Freiburg Lectures (Heidegger), 2 – 3, 7, 20n27, 67, 77n4, 98, 101n7, 197, 277 – 78 Building Dwelling Thinking (Heidegger), 72, 134n65, 240 – 41, 262 Burke, Edmund, 143 calculability, 304 Callebaut, Vincent, 219 capitalism, 36, 44, 82 – 83, 96 – 99, 105n44, 109, 137 Césaire, Aimé, 280, 281, 284, 286 Cézanne, Paul, 179 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 244 Chaplin, Charlie, 180 Chomsky, Noam, 300 Christianity, 177, 192, 200 citizenship: Western conception of, 15 – 16, 253 – 55, 264 – 65 Cogito and the History of Madness (Derrida), 117 – 18 Cold War, 153, 297 coloniality, 272 – 76, 279, 288 – 89 colonization, 18, 196, 289 commodification, 91 – 92, 178 communism, 82 – 84, 96 – 99, 105n41 Confessions (Augustine), 254 consciousness, 64, 71 – 72, 114, 201, 215 Contributions to Philosophy (Heidegger), 9, 104n38, 197, 201 – 2, 303, 312n11 cosmos, 4, 111, 302 Cuban Missile Crisis, 297 cybernetics, 45, 53, 56, 215 – 16, 228 Dadaism, 194, 203 – 4, 212n61 daimōn, 237 – 39 das Man (‘crowd-self’), 126, 128, 140, 146, 237, 286 Davis, Bret, 31, 154n7

de Beistegui, Miguel, 105n45, 185n45, 217 decisionism, 83 – 84, 126 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), 255 deiknumi, 283 Derrida, Jacques, 101n13, 117 – 18, 167, 171, 253, 265, 306 Descartes, René, 68, 70, 184n23, 210n49, 302 – 3 desertification, 14, 26 – 27, 30, 40, 47 – 48, 52. See also nihilism de-severance (Ent-fernung), 6 determinism, 76, 79n38 deus ex machina, 245 dikē, 15, 242 – 43, 245 – 47, 261 – 63 Dikötter, Frank, 195 – 96 directionality (Ausrichtung), 6 disenchantment, 2 displacement, 253 – 55. See also refugees domestication, 220 – 21 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich, 180, 183n6 Douglas, Ray, 195 Duchamp, Marcel, 165 Duncan, Robert, 288 Durkheim, Émile, 139 earthrise photographs, 1 – 2, 18n6, 63 – 64, 66 – 67 Eckhart, Meister (Eckhart von Hochheim), 32, 309 ecological crisis, 10, 15, 217 – 18, 246, 308 ecosystem, 217 – 19, 223 – 24, 228 ego cogitans, 302, 303 ek-stasis, 146, 219 – 21 Eliade, Mircea, 109 Emin, Tracey, 177, 185n48 energeia, 36, 38, 105n48 Entschlossenheit (‘resoluteness’), 145 – 46, 157n60, 260 environmentalism, 63 – 67, 74 – 76, 137, 233 – 35, 242, 244, 246 – 47, 269 Ereignis, 17, 29, 85, 103 – 4, 189, 197



Index 317

ergon, 33, 36 Erinyes, 244 – 45 eschatology, 46, 51, 122, 261 ēthea (hea to 234, 239 ethics, 15–16, 57, 68, 95, 99, 128, 163, 166, 236–38, 241–42; global, 16, 109, 269–71, 273, 275, 280, 288–89 ēthos, 15, 95, 233–43, 247–48 Euclidean geometry, 70 Eurocentrism, 13, 16, 161, 179, 270, 272–73 existential/existentiell, 125, 135n78 facticity (Faktizität), 128, 271, 276, 284 – 85 Falk, Richard, 300 Fanon, Frantz, 274 – 75, 279, 282 fascism, 192, 195, 306 fate (Schicksal), 125 – 28 Faye, Emmanuel, 203, 211n60 Fehér, István, 198 finitude (Endlichkeit), 3, 5, 18, 29, 33, 38, 85, 89 – 90, 92, 99, 102n21, 114, 125, 128 – 30, 240 – 41 First World War, 5, 299 form/matter, 162, 170 – 73, 175, 183 – 84 Foucault, Michel, 12, 113 – 20, 128, 133n32, 277; and dispositif, 7, 115, 118; and Heidegger, 136n92; and historical a priori, 114 – 15, 120 fourfold (das Geviert), 29, 37, 48, 59n1, 240 – 41, 245, 247 Führerprinzip, 138 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 76 Gaia hypothesis, 216 – 17 Galilei, Galileo, 68 – 69, 71 Gandhi, Mahatma (Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi), 300, 311n7 Gans, Eduard, 201, 210n50 Geist, 188, 193, 201, 204 Gelassenheit, 9, 15 – 16, 39, 57, 93 – 94, 138, 150 – 51, 153, 258 – 60, 262 genome, 220 George, Stefan, 283

Gesamtausgabe (Heidegger’s Collected Works), 13, 194 – 96, 209n40 Geschichte des Seyns (Heidegger), 303, 305 – 6 Gestalt, 142 – 43 Gestell, 4, 7, 9 – 11, 14, 17, 43 – 45, 49 – 56, 58 – 59, 77n4, 84 – 85, 92, 102n26, 217, 271, 276 – 79, 284, 307 Ginzburg, Carlo, 112, 118 Greenpeace, 64 – 65 Grundstimmungen (‘fundamental moods’), 139, 148 – 49, 153 Guzmán, Patricio, 129 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 13 – 14, 26, 102n21, 161, 163, 165 – 66, 169, 177, 187 – 93, 201 – 2, 204 – 6 Heidegger, Fritz, 13, 198, 208n23, 210n40 Heidegger, Martin: and Americanism, 192, 202, 205; and anti-Semitism, 14, 21n31, 101n7, 138, 195, 199 – 200, 203; and artwork, 13, 161 – 63, 166, 170, 172 – 73, 175 – 77, 179; and the Black Notebooks (Schwarze Hefte), 13, 21n31, 38, 158n73, 160n109, 189, 194 – 98, 202 – 4, 248n7, 271; and Bolshevism, 98, 192 – 93, 202, 207n17; and Christianity, 202, 207n17; on dwelling, 14 – 15, 33, 38, 43, 48, 57, 59, 234 – 35, 237, 239 – 43, 247, 249n8, 257, 262, 310; and Judaism, 158n73, 198 – 99, 207n17; and language, 69, 123, 134n65, 179, 205, 220, 222, 276, 280 – 81, 283, 307, 309; and liberalism, 192, 207n14; and poetry, 151, 159n90, 180, 307 – 10; and the Spiegel interview, 18n6, 63, 67, 78n38, 96, 191 – 92, 211n52 Heraclitus, 233, 237 – 40, 245, 249n8, 251n38 Hesiod, 149, 234 heterology, 285, 287 Hidalgo, Anne, 219 historicality (Geschichtlichkeit), 79, 92, 124, 126

318

Index

historicism, 114 historicity, 12, 115, 123 – 24, 126, 128, 132n21 historiography, 111 – 12, 114, 272 Hitler, Adolf, 145, 148 – 50, 195, 198, 200, 202, 207n14, 304 – 5 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 148, 150, 159n90, 163, 179, 200 – 201, 210n46, 307 Holocaust, 100 – 101, 150, 203, 209n38. See also Shoah Homer, 131n11, 202, 224, 234, 238 hominization, 220 homo sapiens, 114, 216, 219, 221 Hublin, Jean-Jacques, 221 The Human Condition (Arendt), 256, 257, 263, 264 humanitas, 236, 238 – 39, 243, 244 – 45 human rights, 16, 253 – 55, 288 Husserl, Edmund, 141, 194, 230n38 Hutter, Robert, 178, 186n50 hylē, 27, 30, 39 iconography, 163 Ikenberry, John, 300 Illich, Ivan, 132n21 imperialism, 2 – 3, 52, 145, 178 instrumentalization, 68, 74 interconnectedness, 233, 240, 247 ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), 10, 43, 45, 47 – 49, 52 – 53 Islamism, 10, 44, 49 Jaspers, Karl, 193 – 94, 207n19, 208n20, 303 jihad, 44 – 45, 47, 57 joint attention, 222 – 23, 226 – 27, 230n36 jointure (Fug), 255 – 56, 258 – 59, 262 – 64 Jünger, Ernst, 2, 201 Kant, Immanuel, 4, 19n17, 68, 74, 102n21, 163, 174, 177, 181 – 82, 185n36, 204 – 5, 263 Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (Heidegger), 198 katechon, 121

Kehre (‘turning’), 17, 249n10, 303, 307, 312n10 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, 297 – 99, 310 Khanna, Ranjana, 275 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 300 Klee, Paul, 179 Koselleck, Reinhart, 114 Kristeva, Julia, 171 Lacan, Jacques, 84 – 87, 89 – 91, 94; on the symbolic/the real, 86 – 91 Laclau, Ernesto, 81 – 82, 101n13, 105n49 Lebensraum, 138 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (von), 200, 210n42 Lenin, Vladimir (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov), 2, 98 Letter on Humanism (Heidegger), 91, 95, 97, 235 – 36, 240 – 41, 249n11, 259 Levinas, Emmanuel, 13, 161 – 70, 172, 179, 180, 183n6, 184n26; and Judaism, 164, 182n3 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 86 Lichtung (clearing), 5, 27, 215, 219 The Life of the Mind (Arendt), 260 – 61, 264 logos, 30 – 33, 35 – 37, 111, 116, 119 – 20, 164, 175, 182 Lovell, James, 1 Lovelock, James, 216, 218 Löwith, Karl, 5, 8, 123, 127, 159n88, 194 machination (Machenschaft), 14, 51, 204, 304, 304 – 5, 307, 312n17 Maldonado-Torres, Nelson, 273, 275, 279 – 80 Malpas, Jeff, 20n23, 240 Maoism, 195 martyrdom, 43, 50 – 51, 58 Marx, Karl, 13 – 14, 73 – 74, 95, 105n44, 188 – 89, 191, 202 McDonough, William, 218 McKittrick, Katherine, 275 McNeill, William, 261 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 151, 230n38



Index 319

metanoia, 298, 299 Mignolo, Walter, 273, 275 Mitchell, Andrew J., 77n4, 102n26, 278, 293n75 mobilization, 2, 5, 45, 303 modernity, 10 – 14, 152, 205, 235, 242, 271 – 81, 287 – 90; and crisis, 110 – 12, 121; Heidegger’s critique of, 2 – 5, 197, 270; and subjectivity, 3 – 4, 17, 103n38, 284 – 86. See also representation mortality/immortality, 50, 58, 111, 114, 241, 255 Mwangi, Ingrid, 178, 186n50 NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), 216 National Socialism, 7, 11, 81 – 82, 100, 101n8, 123, 150, 159n88, 192, 194, 199, 202 – 3, 206, 306 natura, 28 negativity, 94, 204 Newton, Isaac, 200, 210n42 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 257 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 28 – 30, 34, 112, 114, 116, 133n32, 144 – 51, 189, 193 – 94, 197, 201 – 2, 249n15, 261, 303, 307 – 8 nihilism, 9, 11, 29, 38, 43, 50, 54, 56, 82, 189, 208n20 nomos, 35 – 37, 119 Nuremberg Trials, 235, 249n11, 300 Obama, Barack, 297 – 99 objectification, 3 – 5, 7, 15, 68 – 71, 74 – 75, 188 – 89, 191, 233 Odysseus (Ulysses), 111, 131n11 oikos, 35, 37 ontic/ontological difference (ontischontologische Differenz), 8 – 9, 26 – 30, 34 – 35, 87 – 95, 113 ontogeny, 274, 282 ontology, 32, 35, 81, 83, 99, 111, 119, 124, 128, 133n32, 141, 146, 178, 183, 222, 227, 230, 257; Cartesian, 70 – 72,

110, 215; fundamental, 26 – 27, 29, 284 – 85; regional, 225 The Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt), 253, 258 Pax Americana, 297, 310 Pelluchon, Corine, 226, 228 phenomenological reduction, 141 phronesis, 257 – 58 phylogeny, 274, 282 physics: ancient, 236; modern, 68 – 69, 71, 74, 303 physis, 28 – 29, 33, 236 Picard, Max, 130 Planck, Max (Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck), 69 Plato, 81, 161, 163, 169, 171, 184n26, 256 – 58, 261, 288, 301, 308 Plato’s Sophist (Heidegger), 256 – 58, 261 poiēsis, 57, 217, 222 polis, 48, 102n26, 111, 148 – 49, 224 – 25, 236 Political Theology (Schmitt), 119 – 20 Pollard, Ingrid, 177, 186n49 Pope Francis (Jorge Mario Bergoglio), 299 positivism, 114 potestas, 38 present-at-hand (Vorhandenheit), 6, 92, 125 – 26 Proust, Marcel, 180 Przywara, Erich, 119, 194, 208n21 Pushkin, Alexander (Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin), 180 Quijano, Aníbal, 272 – 73 Qutb, Sayyd, 44 radicalization, 44 – 46, 273 Rancière, Jacques, 13, 161 – 65, 170, 175, 180 – 82, 185n33, 234 Rankine, William, 34 ready-to-hand (Zuhandenheit), 6, 35, 125, 226 refugees, 253 – 54, 258, 265n2

320

Index

representation, 50, 71 – 72, 74, 274; Heidegger’s critique of modern, 3, 20n23, 191, 204 – 5, 227, 259 – 60, 270, 280 – 82; political, 119 res extensa, 302 Ricœur, Paul (Jean Paul Gustave Ricœur), 220 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 60n19, 179, 307 Rivière, Pierre, 117 – 18 Rockström, Johan, 242 Rodin, Auguste (François Auguste René Rodin), 180 Rose, Chris, 64 – 66, 74 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 160n111, 236, 259 – 60 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 86 scarcity, 15, 240, 242, 246, 248 Schiller, Friedrich von, 163, 185n36 Schmitt, Carl, 2, 12, 113, 119 – 23, 128, 203; and Heidegger, 136n92, 207n14 Schüßler, Ingeborg, 199 Second World War, 17, 35, 101n7, 145, 150, 192, 305 sectarianism, 44 – 45 secularization, 2, 9, 119 – 21 Seinsgeschichte (‘history of being’), 79, 103n38, 190 – 91, 193, 202 – 3 Seinsvergessenheit (‘oblivion of being’), 8, 91 Selbstanschauung (‘self-intuition’), 204 self-transcendence, 55 sensus communis, 174, 185n36 Shakespeare, William, 180 Sheehan, Thomas, 21n31, 125, 135n72, 209n40 Shoah, 185 – 98, 200 silence, 9, 31, 40, 50, 54; and Foucault, 115 – 19, 133n32; and Heidegger, 123, 128, 134n65; and history, 11 – 12, 16, 112 – 13, 129 – 30, 132n21, 136n94; and ontology, 12; and Schmitt, 122 – 23 Sloterdijk, Peter, 15, 219 – 21, 227, 231n42 sociogeny, 274, 282

Socrates, 104, 184n26, 212n63, 224 sophia, 257 – 58 Sorge (‘care’), 124, 138, 146, 287, 302 sovereignty, 254 – 55 space/spatiality: Heidegger’s conception of, 6 – 8, 14 – 16, 20nn23 – 25, 27, 33, 39, 171, 174, 184n27, 215, 222 – 26, 255 – 56, 258, 262 – 64, 305, 309 Spengler, Oswald, 310 Stalinism, 81, 195 standing-reserve (Bestand), 4, 43, 45, 49, 52, 56, 64, 92, 278, 283 – 84 stasis, 263 – 64 structuralism, 86, 88 subiectum, 3, 70 subject/object dichotomy, 71 – 72, 171 – 73, 241 subjectivity, 14, 20n23, 50, 75, 171, 188, 191, 199, 202, 205, 275 – 76, 289, 306; modern, 17, 103n38, 270 – 71, 284 – 87. See also modernity technē, 205, 293 Technik, 4, 7, 14, 43, 207n11, 303 – 4 temporality (Zeitlichkeit), 5, 13, 58, 123 – 25, 127, 130, 135n76, 178, 182, 265 Thiele, Leslie Paul, 241 Thomson, Iain, 173, 185n33 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche), 28, 145 time-space: and compression, 7, 21n27, 289n1; and play (Zeit-Spiel-Raum), 305 Tolstoy, Leo (Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy), 180 Tomasello, Michael, 222 – 23, 226 – 27, 230n36 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 139 topos, 234 – 36, 239 totalitarianism, 11, 81 – 82, 99, 198 Totality and Infinity (Levinas), 167, 172, 183n7 Trakl, Georg, 179, 307 – 10 transcendence, 58 – 59, 93 – 94, 121, 177



Index 321

transcendental/transcendens, 27, 32, 34, 88, 102n21, 112, 115, 125, 181, 238, 263 Trawny, Peter, 13, 195 – 203, 208n26 utility (Nutzen), 304 – 5 van Gogh, Vincent, 173 – 76, 179, 184n27 Verwüstung (devastation), 8, 25 – 26, 28, 31 – 32, 34, 36, 59, 210n51, 306 – 7 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro), 111 Vita Activa (Arendt), 256 von Herrmann, Friedrich-Wilhelm, 194, 196 – 99 Wahhabism, 44 – 45 Wearings, Gillian, 177, 185n48

Weber, Max, 2, 5, 131n14 Wiederholung (‘repetition’ or ‘reactivation’), 126 Wiener, Norbert, 216 will to power, 4 – 5, 10, 12, 34, 51, 133n39, 138, 145, 150, 152, 158n86, 260 – 63, 303, 307 Wolin, Sheldon, 242 Wynter, Sylvia, 16 – 17, 270 – 71, 273 – 75, 280, 282, 285, 287 – 89 Young, Julian, 249n8 Zentralgebiete (‘central domains’), 120 – 21 Žižek, Slavoj, 11, 81 – 91, 94 – 96, 99, 101nn7 – 13, 102n21, 104n38 zoon politikón, 236